III. Chapter on Capital
Chapter on Money as Capital
[ Transformation of Money into Capital]
What makes the comprehension of money in its fully developed character as money especially difficult — difficulties from which political economy seeks to escape by neglecting one of the aspects of money in favour of another, and when confronted by the one appealing to the other — is that here a social relationship, a specific relationship of individuals to one another, appears as a metal, a stone, a purely corporeal object outside individuals, something which is found as such in nature, and in which not a single aspect of its form remains to be distinguished from its natural existence. Gold and silver are not money in and for themselves. Nature no more produces money than it produces a rate of exchange or bankers. In Peru and Mexico, gold and silver were not used as money, although they can be found as jewelry and a developed system of production existed there. To be money is not a natural property of gold and silver, and is therefore entirely unknown to the physicist, chemist, etc., as such. But money is directly gold and silver. Considered as a measure, its specific form still predominates; still more as coin, where this also appears externally in the stamp on the face of the coin. But in the third determination of money, i.e. in its perfected form, in which to be measure and coin appears as merely a function of money, all specificity of form has disappeared, or it coincides directly with its metallic existence. It does not at all appear on its face that it has acquired the function of money as the mere result of the social process; it is money.
This is the more difficult to understand since the immediate use value of precious metal for the living individual bears no relation at all to this role, and altogether, in its role as incarnation of pure exchange value, the recollection of its use value as distinct from exchange value is completely extinguished. Consequently, the basic contradiction contained in exchange value and in the corresponding social mode of production here stands out in its purest form. The attempts to abolish this contradiction by divesting money of its metallic form and postulating it as something also externally posited by society, as the expression of a social relationship of which the ultimate form would be labour money, have already been criticised above(1). It must be quite clear by now that this is mere folly so long as the basis of exchange value is maintained; and, even more, that the illusion that metallic money perverts exchange arises from a complete ignorance of the nature of money. On the other hand, it is also clear that, as the opposition to the dominant relations of production grows, and as these relations themselves push ever more insistently towards casting off the old skin, the polemic turns against metallic money or money in general as the most striking, most contradictory and harshest aspect in which the system tangibly confronts us. Contradictions, of which money is merely the palpable manifestation, are then to be transcended by means of all kinds of artificial monetary manipulations. It is no less clear that many revolutionary operations with money can be carried out, in so far as an attack on it appears only to rectify it while leaving everything else unchanged. We then beat the sack on the donkey's back, while aiming at the donkey. But so long as the donkey does not feel the blows, one actually beats only the sack, not the donkey; contrariwise, if he does feel the blows, we are beating him and not the sack. As long as the operations are directed against money as such, it is simply an attack upon the effects, while the causes remain operative; in other words, a disturbance of the productive process which the solid basis [of the process] has the strength to take and to master — by a more or less violent reaction to it — as a merely temporary disturbance.
On the other hand, in so far as the monetary relationship has hitherto been developed in its pure form, and without reference to more highly developed relations of production, it is inherent in its role that, in monetary relationships simply conceived, all immanent contradictions in bourgeois society appear to be extinguished. Bourgeois democracy therefore falls back on this in its apologetics for existing economic relationships. Bourgeois economists are less inclined to do so (they are at least consistent enough to go back to even simpler determination of exchange value and exchange).
Indeed, in so far as the commodity or labour is now only determined as exchange value, and the relationship of the different commodities to one another is now only determined as the mutual exchange — the equating — of these exchange values, the individuals — the subjects between whom this process takes place — are only and simply determined as exchangers. There is absolutely no difference between them, so far as their specific form is concerned, and this is the economic role, the role in which they stand in a commercial relationship to each other; it is the indicator of their social function or social relationship to one another. Each of the subjects is an exchanger, i.e. each has the same social relationship to the other as the other has to him. As subjects of exchange, their relation is therefore that of equality. It is impossible to find any trace of a difference, let alone of a conflict between them, not even a distinction. Furthermore, the commodities which they exchange are, as exchange values, equivalents or at least count as such. (They could only make subjective mistakes in their valuation of each other's commodity; and if one individual were to cheat the other, this would not be because of the nature of the social function in which they confront each other, for this is the same; in this they are equal; but only because of the natural cunning, the arts of persuasion, etc., in short because of the purely individual superiority of the one individual over the other. The difference would be a natural one, having nothing to do with the nature of the relationship as such, and which, as further analysis will show, will even be weakened by competition, etc., and robbed of its original force.)
Considering the pure form, the economic aspect of the relationship, there emerge only three formally distinct moments. (The content outside this form here really does not concern political economy; or it is posited as a natural content distinct from the economic; and it can be said to be completely distinct from the economic relationship, because it still directly coincides with it.[69]) These three moments are: the subjects of the relationship, the exchangers, posited in the same role; the objects of their exchange, exchange values, equivalents, [II-9] which not only are equal but are explicitly supposed to be equal, and are posited as equal; finally, the act of exchange itself, the mediation by which the subjects are posited precisely as exchangers, equals, and their objects as equivalents, as equal. The equivalents are the objectification of the one subject for the others, i.e. they themselves are of equal worth and prove themselves in the act of exchange as of equal value and at the same time as indifferent to one another. The subjects exist for one another in exchange only through the equivalents, as individuals of equal value, and prove themselves as such by the exchange of the objectivity in which the one exists for the others. Since they only exist for one another in this way, as individuals of equal value, as possessors of equivalents who prove this equivalence in exchange, they are both equivalent and at the same time indifferent to one another. Any other individual difference between them does not concern them; they are indifferent to all other properties they may individually possess.
The act of exchange is both the positing and the confirmation of exchange values as well as of the subjects as exchangers. The content falling outside the act of exchange, outside the specific economic form, can only consist of: (1) the natural particularity of the commodities exchanged; (2) the particular natural need of the exchangers. Or, combining both aspects, the different use value of the commodities to be exchanged. So far from compromising the social equality of individuals, this content of exchange, which lies wholly outside the specifically economic form, turns their natural difference into the basis of their social equality. If individual A had the same need as individual B, and had realised his labour in the same object as individual B, no relation at all would exist between them. From the viewpoint of production, they would not be different individuals at all. Both of them must breathe; for both of them the air exists as the atmosphere; but this does not bring them into any social contact. As individuals who must breathe, they are related to one another not as persons but only as natural bodies. Only the difference of their needs and their production is the occasion for exchange and for their being socially equated in it. Hence this natural difference is the precondition of their social equality in the act of exchange and of this relationship in general, in which they relate to each other as productive agents. Regarded in the light of this natural difference, individual A exists as the possessor of a use value for B, and B exists as the possessor of a use value for A. In this respect their natural difference again places them in the relationship of mutual equality. However, this does not make them indifferent to one another, but integrate with one another, they need each other, so that individual B, objectified in his commodity, is needed by A and vice versa. Accordingly, they stand not merely in a relation of equality to one another, but also in a social relation.
More: the fact that the need of the one individual can be satisfied by the product of the other and vice versa, and that the one is able to produce the object for the other's need, and that each confronts the other as possessor of the object of the other's need, shows that as a human being each transcends his own particular needs, etc., that they are behaving towards each other as men, that their common species being is known by all. This is unique. Elephants do not produce for tigers, or animals for other animals. A swarm of bees, for instance, au fond constitutes only one bee, and all the bees produce the same thing.
Moreover, in so far as this natural difference between individuals and their commodities(2) constitutes the motivation for their integration, for their social relationship as exchangers, in which they are presupposed as and prove themselves to be equals, freedom comes to play a role in addition to equality. Although individual A may feel a need for the commodity of individual B, he does not seize it by force, or vice versa; A and B recognise each other as owners, as persons, whose commodities are permeated by their will. Accordingly, the juridical concept of the person comes in here, as well as that of freedom in so far as it is contained therein. Neither forcibly takes possession of the property of the other; each disposes of it voluntarily.
But this is not all. Individual A satisfies individual B's need by means of the commodity a only to the extent that and because individual B satisfies individual A's need by means of commodity b, and vice versa. Each serves the other in order to serve himself; and makes reciprocal use of the other as his means. Each individual is now conscious that (1) each attains his end only in so far as he serves the other as means; (2) each becomes a means for the other (being for another) only as end for himself (being for himself); (3) this reciprocity whereby each is at once means and end, and moreover attains his end only in so far as he becomes means, and only becomes means in so far as he posits himself as end for himself, in other words that each posits himself as being for another in so far as he is being for himself, and the other as being for him in so far as he is being for himself — that this reciprocity is a necessary FACT, presupposed as a natural condition of exchange, but that it is as such a matter of indifference for each of the two subjects of exchange, and is of interest to each of them only in so far as it satisfies his own interest as excluding that of the other, without relation to it.
This means that the social interest which appears as the motive of the act as a whole, is certainly recognised as a FACT on both sides, but as such it is not the motive, but goes on, as it were, merely behind the back of the self-reflected[72] particular interests, behind the back of an individual's interest in contrast to that of the other. In this latter respect, the individual can at most have the consoling awareness that the satisfaction of his individual interest as opposed to that of the other is precisely the realisation of the transcended [11-10] antithesis, of the general social interest. From the act of exchange itself, the individual, each of them, is reflected in himself as the exclusive and dominant (determining) subject of the exchange. With that the complete freedom of the individual is posited: voluntary transaction; force on neither side; positing of oneself as means, or as serving, only as a means to posit oneself as end in oneself, as the dominating and transcend-ing element; ultimately realising the selfish interest, not an interest standing above it. The other party to the exchange is also recognised and known as likewise realising his own selfish interest, so that both know that the social interest is nothing but the exchange of the selfish interest in its duality, many-sidedness and autonomy. The general interest is nothing but the generality of selfish interests.
Thus, if the economic form, exchange, in every respect posits the equality of the subjects, the content, the material, both individual and objective, which impels them to exchange, posits freedom. Hence equality and freedom are not only respected in exchange which is based on exchange values, but the exchange of exchange values is the real productive basis of all equality and freedom. As pure ideas, equality and freedom are merely idealised expressions of this exchange; developed in juridical, political and social relations, they are merely this basis at a higher level. And indeed this has been confirmed by history. Equality and freedom at the higher level are the exact opposite of freedom and equality in the ancient world, which were not based on developed exchange value, but which on the contrary perished through its development. They presuppose relations of production not yet realised in the ancient world, nor indeed in the Middle Ages. Direct forced labour was the foundation of the ancient world; it was on this existing basis that the community rested. Labour itself regarded as a privilege, as still particularised, not labour generally producing exchange values, was the foundation of the Middle Ages. [Modern] labour is neither forced labour, nor, as in the second case, is it carried on with reference to something common, as something higher (corporations).
Admittedly, it is true that [the relationship of] the exchangers is also based on a certain coercion when considered from the viewpoint of their motive for carrying on exchange, i.e. their natural needs, which fall outside the economic process. But on the one hand, this relationship itself is merely the indifference of the other for my need as such, for my natural individuality; in other words, his equality with me and his freedom, which is, however, just as much the precondition of mine. On the other hand, in so far as I am conditioned, forced by my needs, it is merely my own nature as a totality of needs and impulses (or, posited in a general, reflected form, my interest) that does violence to me, not something alien. But it is after all also precisely this aspect of me with which I coerce the other, driving him into the system of exchange.
In Roman Law the servus is therefore correctly defined as one who can acquire nothing for himself by means of exchange (see Institutions[73]). It is therefore clear that this law, although it corresponds to a state of society in which exchange was by no means developed, nevertheless, in as much as it was developed in a certain sphere, could evolve the definitions of the legal person, i.e. the individual engaged in exchange, and could thus (at least in basic principle) anticipate the legal system of industrial society. Above all, it could be upheld as the law of emerging bourgeois society as against the Middle Ages. It is significant that its development coincides exactly with the dissolution of the Roman community.
Since exchange value is only realised in money, and the system of exchange value has only been realised with the rise of a developed money system or conversely, the money system can in fact only be the realisation of this system of freedom and equality. As a measure, money merely gives a definite expression to the equivalent. It turns it into the equivalent also in form. In the process of circulation, it is true, a distinction in form arises: the two parties to the exchange appear in the distinct roles of buyer and seller; exchange value appears first as general in the form of money, then as particular in the natural commodity, which now has a price. However, firstly, these forms alternate; circulation itself does not establish inequality, but is an equalisation, a transcendence of the merely imagined difference. The inequality is purely formal. Finally, equality is established quite objectively in money Avhen in circulation, appearing now in the hands of one person, now in the hands of another, and quite indifferent to where it appears. In the process of exchange, each party appears to the other as the possessor of money, as money itself. Hence the indifference and equivalence gain explicit existence in the form of the object. The particular natural difference that characterised the commodity is extinguished and is continually being extinguished by means of circulation. A worker who buys a commodity for 3s. appears to the seller in the same function, in the same equality, in the form of 3s., as the king who buys this commodity. All difference between them is extinguished. The seller qua seller appears only as the possessor of a commodity priced at 3s., so that both [buyer and seller] are perfectly equal, except that the 3s. exist once in the form of silver, the other time in the form of sugar, etc.
In the third form of money, it might appear that the subjects of the process play different roles. But in so far as money here appears as material, as the universal commodity of contracts, all distinction between the parties to the contract is in fact extinguished. In as much as money becomes the object of accumulation, the subject here [11-11] appears only to withdraw money, the universal form of wealth, from circulation, in so far as he does not withdraw from it commodities for the same price. If, therefore, one individual accumulates while the other does not, neither does so at the expense of the other. The one enjoys real wealth, the other gains possession of the universal form of wealth. If one becomes impoverished while the other enriches himself, it is by their own free will and in no way the result of economic conditions, of the economic relation in which they stand to one another. Even inheritance and similar juridical relationships, which perpetuate inequalities arising in this manner, do not impair this natural freedom and equality. If the original relationship of individual A is not in contradiction with this system, such a contradiction certainly cannot be created by individual B taking the place of individual A, thus perpetuating him. Rather, inheritance makes the social determination valid beyond the natural length of [human] life; it reinforces the social determination against the casual impact of nature, whose effect as such would indeed be tantamount to the transcendence of the freedom of the individual. Besides, since the individual in this relationship is merely the individuation of money, he is as such just as immortal as money, and his representation by his heirs is nothing but the realisation of this role.
If this way of looking at the matter is not emphasised in its historical significance, but held up in refutation of the more highly developed economic relationships in which individuals emerge no longer as mere exchangers or buyers and sellers but in specific relationships to one another, in which they no longer all have the same character — this would amount to the assertion that no difference exists between natural bodies, still less antagonism and contradiction, because they are e.g. all heavy and consequently equal in so far as defined by having weight; or that they are equal because they are all spatially three-dimensional. Also exchange value itself is here taken in its simple character as against its more developed antagonistic forms. Seen as part of the process of science these abstract roles appear as the first and most rudimentary. To some extent this is how they occur in history; what is more highly developed appears later. In the totality of existing bourgeois society, this postulation as price and its circulation, etc., appears as the superficial process, below which, in the depths, quite other processes occur in which the apparent equality and freedom of individuals disappear.
On the one hand, it is forgotten that right from the start the premiss of exchange value as the objective basis of the whole system of production already implies coercion of the individual, that his immediate product is not a product for himself but becomes such only in the social process, and is obliged to adopt this general and nevertheless exterior form. It is forgotten that the individual no longer exists except as a producer of exchange value. This implies the complete negation of his natural existence; hence he is wholly determined by society. It is forgotten, moreover, that this also presupposes division of labour, etc., in which the individual is already placed in relationships other than those of mere exchangers, etc. It is forgotten that, consequently, the premiss [of the individual as producer of exchange value] in no way arises either from the individual's will or his immediate nature, but is historical, and already assumes the individual as determined by society.
On the other hand, it is forgotten that the higher forms in which exchange or the relations of production realised in exchange now appear, certainly do not remain in this simple determinateness, where the greatest difference which develops is formal and hence insignificant.
Finally, it is overlooked that the antagonism of wages(3) and capital, etc., is already latent in the simple determination of exchange value and money. What this wise approach therefore amounts to is a refusal to advance beyond the simplest economic relationships. Conceived of in isolation these are pure abstractions; but in reality they are mediated by means of the most profound contradictions, and present an aspect in which the expression of these contradictions is blurred.
On the other hand, this also shows the folly of those socialists (especially the French socialists, who wish to prove socialism to be the realisation of the ideas of bourgeois society enunciated by the French Revolution) who purport to demonstrate that exchange, exchange value, etc., were originally (in time) or are essentially (in their adequate form) a system of the freedom and equality of all, but have been perverted by money, capital, etc. Or alternately, that history has so far failed in its attempts to realise exchange and exchange value in their real essence, and that now the socialists, e.g. Proudhon, have discovered the genuine recipe which will substitute the true history of these relationships for the false. The answer to them is as follows: exchange value or, more precisely, the money system, is indeed the system of freedom and equality, and what disturbs them in the more recent development of the system are disturbances immanent to the system, i.e. the very realisation of equality and freedom, which turn out to be inequality and unfreedom. It is an aspiration as pious as it is stupid to wish that exchange value would not develop into capital, or that labour which produces exchange value would not develop into wage labour. What distinguishes these gentlemen from the bourgeois apologists is, on the one hand, their awareness of the contradictions inherent in the system and, on the other, their utopianism, manifest in their failure to grasp the inevitable difference between the real and ideal shape of bourgeois society, and the consequent desire to undertake the superfluous task of changing the ideal expression itself back into reality, whereas it is in fact merely the photographic image [Lichtbild] of this reality.
[11-12] Now behold, in opposition to these socialists, the vapid arguments of the degenerate political economy of the most recent times,(4) claiming to prove that economic relationships always express the same simple determinations and hence always express the equality and freedom of the simply determined exchange of exchange values, which amounts to nothing but infantile abstraction. For example: the relationship of capital and interest is reduced to the exchange of exchange values. No sooner is it admitted on the basis of experience that exchange value not only exists in this simple determinateness but also in the essentially different one as capital, than capital is reduced once more to the simple concept of exchange value; and, what is more, interest, which expresses a definite relationship of capital as such, is likewise divested of its specific form and equated to exchange value. The entire relationship in its specific form is turned into an abstraction and reduced to the undeveloped relationship of the exchange of commodity for commodity. If I abstract from that which distinguishes something concrete from its abstract form it [the result] is naturally the abstract and [turns out to be] in no way different from it. According to this procedure, all economic categories are only various names given to one and the same relationship, and this crude inability to grasp the real differences between them is then supposed to represent pure COMMON SENSE as such. Hence the "economic harmonies" of Mr. Bastiat amount au fond to asserting that only a single economic relationship exists which adopts different names, or that difference can occur only in nomenclature. His reductionism is not even formally scientific in the sense that everything is reduced to one real economic relationship ignoring the difference inherent in development. He merely ignores now one aspect, now another, so as to bring out now one side of the identity, now another.
For example, the wages for labour are said to be payment for the service which one individual renders to another. (Here, as already pointed out above, the economic form as such is ignored.) Profit is also defined as the payment for the service which one individual renders to another. Consequently, wages for labour and profit are identical, and it is really an aberration of language which leads us to call one payment "wages" and the other "profit". But now for profit and interest. In profit, the payment for service is exposed to risk; in interest, it is fixed. Hence, since in wages payment is relatively fixed, while in profit, in contrast to labour, it is exposed to risk, the relationship between interest and profit is the same as that between wages and profit, which, as we have seen, is a reciprocal exchange of equivalents. The opponents [of Bastiat][74] then take these trivialities literally (which arise because they go back from economic relationships in which the conflict is explicit to those in which it is still merely latent and obscured) and purport to prove that, e.g. with capital and interest, there is not a simple exchange, in that capital is not replaced by an equivalent, but that after the owner has consumed 20 times the equivalent in the form of interest, he still has it in the form of capital and can exchange it again for 20 new equivalents. Thus we get the unedifying debate in which one side asserts that there is no difference between developed and undeveloped exchange value, while the other asserts that such a difference unfortunately does exist, but in all fairness should not.
Money as capital is a determination of money that goes beyond its simple determination as money. It can be considered as a higher form of realisation just as it might be said that man is a developed ape. In this case, however, the lower form is taken as the transcending subject and set above the higher form. In any case, money as capital is distinct from money as money. We must analyse the new determination. On the other hand, capital as money appears to be the retrogression of capital into a lower form. But it is only the positing of capital in a particular form which as non-capital already exists prior to it, and constitutes one of its presuppositions. Money recurs in all later relationships, but then it no longer functions as mere money. If, as at this point, our first task is to follow its development up to its totality as money market, the rest of the development is presupposed, and must be brought into the argument from time to time. Thus, we consider here the general determination of capital before we go on to discuss its particular form as money.
If, like e.g. Say, I define capital as a sum of values* I am saying nothing more than that capital= exchange value. Every sum of values is an exchange value, and every exchange value is a sum of values. I cannot get from exchange value to capital by simple addition. As we have seen, the mere accumulation of money does not yet imply the relationship of capitalisation.
In what is called retail trade, the daily commerce of bourgeois life, as it is carried on directly between producers and consumers, in petty trade, the aim is the exchange of the commodity for money on the one hand and the exchange of money for a commodity on the other, for the satisfaction of individual needs. And it is only in this movement, which takes place on the surface of the bourgeois world, that the movement of exchange values, their circulation, proceeds in its pure form. A worker who buys a loaf of bread, and a millionaire who does the same, appear in this transaction merely as simple purchasers, just as the shopkeeper appears to confront them merely as a seller. Here all their other characteristics are extinguished. The content as well as the volume of their purchases appear completely irrelevant [11-13] to this specific form.
In theory, the concept of value is antecedent to that of capital but, on the other hand, its pure development presupposes a mode of production based on capital. The same is true in practice. For this reason the economists necessarily view capital on the one hand as the creator and source of values, and on the other hand they presuppose value for the formation of capital and represent capital itself only as a sum of values in a particular function. The existence of value in its pure state and generality presupposes a mode of production in which the individual product has ceased to exist as such for the producer in general, and still more for the individual worker, and is nothing unless realised in circulation. For the person who produces an infinitesimal part of a yard of cotton, it is not a formal definition that it is value, exchange value. If he had not produced an exchange value, money, he would have produced nothing at all. Hence, this determination of value presupposes a given historical stage of the social mode of production and is itself a historical relationship arising out of that stage.
On the other hand, individual moments of the determination of value develop at earlier stages of society's historical process of production and appear as its result.
Within the system of bourgeois society, therefore, capital directly follows upon value. Historically, it is preceded by other systems which constitute the material basis for the less complete development of value. Just as exchange value here only figures incidentally alongside use value, not capital but the relation of landed property appears as the real basis. Modern landed property, by contrast, cannot be understood at all [in this context], because its existence presupposes that of capital, and historically it does in fact develop as the earlier historical version of landed property turned by capital into a form adequate to itself. Thus the development of landed property is particularly suitable for the study of the gradual victory and establishment of capital. That is why Ricardo, the economist of the modern era, with a fine sense of history chose to examine the relations of capital, wage labour and ground rent within the boundaries of landed property, in order to describe them in their specific form. The relationship of the industrial capitalist to the landlord appears to lie outside the sphere of landed property. But as the relationship of the modern farmer to the recipient of rent, it appears immanent in landed property itself, and the latter now appears to exist only in relation to capital. In fact, the history of landed property, demonstrating the gradual transformation of the feudal landlord into the recipient of rent, of the hereditary, half-tributary and often unfree tenant into the modern farmer, and of the serf and villein tied to the soil and subjected to labour-services into the agricultural day-labourer, would be the history of the formation of modern capital. It would include the relationship [of landed property] to urban capital, trade, etc. But here we are concerned with bourgeois society as it has become, developing on its own basis.
In the first instance capital emerges from circulation, and money is its point of departure. We have seen(5) that money entering into circulation, and at the same time returning from circulation into itself, is the ultimate form of money, in which money is transcended. It is simultaneously the first concept of capital and the first form in which capital appears. Money has negated itself as something merely absorbed in circulation; but it has likewise negated itself as something independently confronting circulation. This negation, taken as a whole, in its positive aspects, contains the first elements of capital. Money is the first form in which capital appears as such. M—C—C—M; the exchange of money for the commodity and of the commodity for money; this movement of buying in order to sell, which constitutes the specific form of trade, capital as merchant capital, is found in the earliest periods of economic development. It is the first movement in which exchange value as such forms the content of the exchange, is not only form but its own content. This movement can take place within peoples and between peoples for whose production exchange value has by no means yet become the prerequisite. The movement only touches the surplus of their output, which is still directed towards the satisfaction of their immediate needs, and takes place only on the boundary of production. Special trading peoples could play this mediating role between peoples whose mode of production did not yet presuppose exchange value as its basis. Thus in antiquity, and later the Lombards, thus the Jews within the old Polish society or in medieval society in general.
Commercial capital is merely circulating capital, and circulating capital is the first form of capital, a form in which it has by no means yet become the basis of production. A more developed form of capital is money capital and monetary interest, usury, whose independent appearance likewise belongs to an early stage of development. Finally, the initial appearance of merchant capital presupposes the form, C—M—M—C, in which money and circulation in general appear as mere means for the circulating commodity, which for its part leaves circulation again and directly satisfies needs. The preconditions appear to be distributed among different peoples, or within society commercial capital as such is conditioned only by this circulation directed purely towards consumption. On the other hand, the circulating commodity, the commodity that is realised only by adopting the form of another commodity which drops out of circulation and satisfies immediate [11-14] needs, is also an original form of capital, which is essentially commodity capital.
On the other side, it is equally clear that the simple movement of exchange values, as it is present in pure circulation, can never realise capital. It can lead to the withdrawal and hoarding of money, but as soon as money enters into circulation again it is dissolved in a series of exchange processes with commodities, which are consumed. It is therefore lost once its purchasing power has been exhausted. Equally, the commodity that has been exchanged for a commodity by means of money, drops out of circulation to be consumed, destroyed. But if it is made independent of circulation as money, it now represents only the non-substantial general form of wealth. Since equivalents are exchanged for one another, the form of wealth which is fixed as money disappears as soon as that money is exchanged for the commodity, and the use value existing in that commodity disappears as soon as the commodity is exchanged for money. By means of the simple act of exchange, each can only be lost in its determination for the other when it is realised in the other. Neither can maintain itself in its own determination by transforming itself into the other. The sophistries of the bourgeois economists, who whitewash capital by purporting to reduce it to pure exchange, have therefore been countered by the demand — no less sophistical but justified against them—really to reduce capital to pure exchange, whereby it would disappear as a [social] power and be destroyed either in the form of commodity or money.(6) The repetition of the process from both points, money or commodity, is not implied in the conditions of exchange itself. The act can only be repeated until it is completed, i.e. until there has been exchange up to the amount of the exchange value. It cannot rekindle itself. Circulation therefore does not contain in itself the principle of self-renewal. Its moments are presupposed in it, not posited by it itself. New commodities must continually be thrown into it from without, like fuel into fire. Otherwise it goes out in indifference. It would be extinguished in money as the indifferent result. For in so far as it no longer related to commodities, prices, circulation, money would cease to be money and to express a relationship of production; it would now continue to exist only as a metal but not economically. Circulation therefore, which appears as that which is immediately present on the surface of bourgeois society, exists only in so far as it is continually mediated. Considered in itself, it is the mediation of presumed extremes. But it does not posit these extremes. Hence it must itself be mediated not only in each of its moments but as the totality of mediation, as a total process. Its immediate being is therefore pure semblance. It is the image of a process occurring behind it.
Circulation is now negated in each of its moments'—as commodity — as money — and as relation between them, as simple exchange and as circulation of both commodity and money. If originally the act of social production appeared as the positing of exchange values and this, in its further development, appeared as circulation — as the fully developed reciprocal movement of exchange values — then circulation itself now goes back into the activity that posits or produces exchange values. It goes back into it as into its ground. Commodities (whether in their particular form or in the general form of money) are the premiss of circulation, and these are the realisation of a definite labour time, and as such are values. Circulation therefore presupposes both the production of commodities by labour as well as their production as exchange values. This is its point of departure and by its own movement it returns into the production which creates exchange values as its result.
Once again, therefore, we have arrived back at the point of departure: production which creates, which posits, exchange values. But now it presupposes circulation as a developed moment and appears as a constant process positing circulation and continually returning from circulation back into itself, in order to posit it anew. Hence the movement which posits exchange values now appears in a much more complex form, in that it is no longer only the movement of the presupposed exchange values or the movement which formally posits them as prices, but the movement which simultaneously creates, produces, exchange values as its own premiss. Production itself is here no longer present before its results, is no longer presupposed, but appears as something which itself simultaneously produces these results. But it no longer produces these results as merely leading to circulation, as at the first stage, but as simultaneously presupposing circulation, developed circulation, in its process. (Au fond, circulation only consists in the formal process of positing exchange value, now in the determination of commodity, now in that of money.)
This movement appears in different forms, both historically as giving rise to labour which produces value and also, on the other hand, within the system of bourgeois production itself, i.e. production which posits exchange values. In the case of barbarian or semi-barbarian peoples, the trading peoples at first act as intermediaries; or else tribes whose production is different in character due to natural conditions enter into contact with each other and exchange their surplus. The first case is the more classical form. Let us therefore stick to it. The exchange of surpluses is a relation which posits exchange and exchange value, but it extends only to the surplus and plays a secondary role vis-à-vis [II-15] production itself. But with the more frequent return of the traders soliciting exchange (the Lombards, Normans, etc., play this role in relation to almost all European peoples), a continuing trade is developed. In this trade the producing people now only carries on a so-called passive trade, in that the stimulus to the activity positing exchange value is an external one, not the internal form of its production. When this happens, the surplus product must not be a fortuitous one, only occasionally available, but must be continually reproduced. In this way domestic production itself acquires a tendency to be directed towards circulation, towards the positing of exchange values.
At first the effect is mainly material. The range of needs is enlarged; the aim is the satisfaction of new needs, and therefore greater regularity in and expansion of production. The organisation of domestic production itself has already been modified by circulation and exchange value; but it has not yet been captured by them either over its entire surface or in its full depth. This is what is called the civilising effect of foreign trade. To what extent the activity positing exchange value captures production as a whole then depends partly upon the intensity of this external influence, partly upon the degree to which the elements of domestic production — division of labour, etc.—have already been developed. Thus in England in the 16th century and at the beginning of the 17th, the importation of commodities from the Netherlands gave a decisive significance to the surplus of wool that England had to offer in exchange. In order to produce more wool, arable land was converted into sheep pastures, the small leaseholding system was broken up, etc., the CLEARING of ESTATES took place, etc.
Agriculture therefore lost the character of labour for use value, and the exchange of its surplus lost its character of indifference towards the internal structure of agriculture. At certain points, agriculture was exclusively determined by circulation, transformed into a production positing exchange value. Not only was the mode of production changed thereby, but all the former conditions of population and production, all the economic relations corresponding to that mode, were dissolved. Thus, here we have a case of circulation which originally presupposed a production creating exchange values only as a surplus; but this production gave way to one purely oriented towards circulation, a production whose exclusive content was the positing of exchange values.
On the other hand, in modern production, which presupposes exchange value and developed circulation, prices and production determine each other.
If it is said that capital "is accumulated (realised) labour (properly objectified labour) which serves as the means for new labour (production)",(7) then only the simple substance of capital is being considered, and its formal character, without which it is not capital, is ignored. It means no more than that capital is — an instrument of production, for, in the broadest sense, everything must first be appropriated by means of some kind of activity, even an object supplied purely by nature, e.g. stones, before it can serve as an instrument, a means of production. According to this, capital would have existed in all forms of society, would be something entirely unhistorical. According to this, every part of the body is capital, for each part has not only to be developed by activity, by labour, but must also be nourished, reproduced, in order to be active as an organ. The arm and especially the hand are capital according to this. Capital would only be a new name for something as old as mankind, for each type of labour, even the most undeveloped, like hunting, fishing, etc., presupposes that the product of previous labour is used as a means for immediate, living, labour.
A further implication of the definition given above is that the physical matter of the products is wholly abstracted from, and previous labour itself is considered as their only content (matter). Also abstracted from is the particular special purpose for whose fulfilment this product is intended to serve as means, and only production in general is posited as purpose. All this would appear merely as the work of abstraction, which is equally valid for all social conditions, and which only takes the analysis further and formulates it more abstractly (generally) than was usually the case.
If we abstract in this way from the specific form of capital, and emphasise only its content with respect to which it is a necessary moment of all labour, then of course nothing is easier than to prove that capital is a necessary condition for all human production. We have only to abstract from the specific characteristics of capital which make it into a moment of a particularly developed historical stage of human production. The irony is that if all capital is objectified labour which serves as means for new production, not all the objectified labour that serves as means for new production is capital. Capital is conceived of as a thing, not as a relationship.
If it is said on the other hand that capital is a sum of values employed for the production of values, then this means: capital is self-reproducing exchange value. But formally exchange value also reproduces itself in simple circulation. In this explanation, admittedly, the form is grasped wherein exchange value is the point of departure, but the relation to content (which in the case of capital, unlike in that of simple exchange value, is not irrelevant) is dropped.
If it is said that capital is exchange value which produces a profit, or at least is employed with the intention of producing a profit, capital is already presupposed for its own explanation, for profit is a definite relationship of capital to itself. Capital is not a simple relationship but a process, always remaining capital in its various moments. This process must therefore be analysed.
There is already something surreptitious about defining capital as accumulated labour, for [11-16] in its essential characteristic it should be merely objectified labour, though this admittedly embodies an already accumulated definite quantity of labour. But accumulated labour itself already comprises a quantity of objects in which labour is realised.
exchange, and each was satisfied to get a useful object in exchange for a useless one. But when the division of labour had made ... everyone into a merchant and society into a commercial society, no one wished to part with one's products except in exchange for their equivalent; it was therefore necessary, in order to determine this equivalent, to know the value of what was being offered and what was received" (Ganilh, [Des systèmes d'économie politique, Vol. 2, Paris, 1809, pp. 11-12,] 12, b [7 5]). (8)
In other words, exchange did not remain at the stage of formally positing exchange values but necessarily went on to subject production itself to exchange value.
1. Circulation and Exchange Value Deriving from Circulation as a Prerequisite of Capital
In order to develop the concept of capital, we must begin not with labour but with value, or more precisely, with the exchange value already developed in the movement of circulation. It is just as impossible to pass directly from labour to capital as from the different races of men directly to the banker, or from nature to the steam-engine. We have seen that in money as such exchange value has already acquired a form independent of circulation, but only a negative, evanescent or illusory one when fixed. Money exists only in relation to circulation and as the possibility of entering into it; but it loses this determination as soon as it realises itself, and falls back into its two earlier determinations as measure of exchange values and as means of exchange. As soon as money is posited as exchange value which not merely makes itself independent of circulation but maintains itself inside it, it is no longer money, for money as such does not extend beyond the negative determination; it is capital.
It is an historical FACT that money is the first form in which exchange value proceeds to the character of capital, and that therefore the first form in which capital appears is confused with capital itself or is considered to be its only adequate form. And this fact, far from contradicting our analysis, actually confirms it. The first attribute of capital is this: that the exchange value deriving from circulation and thus presupposing it, maintains itself within it and by means of it; that it does not lose itself when it enters into circulation; that circulation is not the movement of its vanishing but rather the movement of its real self-positing as exchange value, its realisation as exchange value.
It cannot be said that in simple circulation exchange value as such is realised. It is always realised only in the moment of its disappearance. If a commodity is exchanged for another commodity by means of money, its value-character disappears in the moment in which it is realised, and it steps outside the relation, becomes indifferent to it and is now only a direct object of need. If money is exchanged for a commodity, then this posits even the disappearance of the form of exchange as merely formal mediation to get hold of the natural material of the commodity. If a commodity is exchanged for money, the form of exchange value, exchange value posited as exchange value, money, persists only so long as it remains outside exchange, withdraws from it. Money is therefore a purely illusory, purely notional realisation in this form, in which the independence of exchange value palpably exists. Finally, if money is exchanged for money — the fourth form in which circulation can be analysed but au fond only the third form expressed in the form of exchange — there no longer appears even a formal distinction between the different things; DISTINCTION WITHOUT A DIFFERENCE; not only does exchange value disappear, but so does the formal movement of its disappearance. Au fond, these four specific forms of simple circulation can be reduced to two, which, however, coincide in themselves. The difference between them is a question of emphasis and depends on which of the two moments — money and commodity — is stressed, which of them is taken as the point of departure. Thus, money for commodity: the exchange value of the commodity disappears and is replaced by its material content (substance); commodity for money: its content (substance) disappears and is replaced by its form as exchange value. In the first case the form of exchange value is extinguished, in the second its substance; in both, therefore, its realisation is its disappearance.
Only in capital is exchange value posited as exchange value, because only there does it maintain itself in circulation, i.e. only there does it neither lose its substance, because it realises itself in ever different substances, in a totality of them; nor does it lose its specific form, because it maintains its identity with itself in each of the different substances. Hence it always remains both money and commodity. It is, at each instant, both of the moments which disappear into one another in the course of circulation. But it is this only because it is itself a constantly self-renewing circuit of exchanges. In this respect, too, the circulation of exchange value [in capital] is distinct from that of simple exchange values as such. This simple circulation is in fact circulation only from the standpoint of the observer, or circulation in itself, not circulation posited as such. Precisely because the substance of exchange value is a particular commodity, it is not the same exchange value which first becomes money and then commodity again; on the contrary, it is always different exchange values, different commodities, which confront money. Circulation, the circuit, consists merely of the simple repetition or alternation [II-17] of the determination of commodity and money, and not of the identity of the real point of departure and the point of return. Therefore, simple circulation as such where only money is the persistent moment, has been described as mere circulation of money, mere turnover of money.
'"Capital values perpetuate themselves" (Say, [Traité d'économie politique, 3rd ed., Vol. II, p. 185,] 14[76]).(1)
"Capital — permanent value" ("multiplying itself" is not yet relevant here) "which did not perish any more. This value tears itself away from the commodity which had created it; it remained equal to a metaphysical, insubstantial quality always in the possession of the same husbandman" (the precise term makes no difference: say "owner") "for whom it assumed different forms" (Sismondi, [Nouveaux principes d'économie politique, 2nd ed., Vol. I, Paris, 1827, p. 89,] VI ).
The immortality to which money aspired when it posited itself negatively as against, and withdrew from, circulation, is attained by capital, which maintains itself precisely by surrendering to circulation. As exchange value presupposed by or presupposing circulation and maintaining itself in it, capital is not only at each instant ideally each of the two moments contained in simple circulation, but alternately adopts the form of each of them. But it does so no longer merely by passing from one into the other, as in simple circulation, but by being in each of these determinations at the same time a relation to the opposite one, i.e. notionally containing it within itself.
Capital alternately becomes commodity and money. But (1) it is itself the alternation of these two determinations; (2) it becomes commodity, not this or that commodity, but a totality of commodities. It is not indifferent to the substance [of the commodity] but to its particular form. In this respect, it appears as a constant metamorphosis of this substance. In so far as capital is posited as a particular content of exchange value, this particularity is itself a totality of particularity; hence not indifferent to particularity as such, but to single or individuated particularity. The identity, the form of generality which it acquires, is that of being exchange value and as such money. Hence it is still posited as money, IN FACT it exchanges as commodity for money. But being posited as money, i.e. as this antithetical form of the generality of exchange value, it is at the same time inherently bound to lose not generality, as in simple circulation, but rather the antithetical attribute of generality, or to adopt it only fleetingly, i.e. it exchanges itself again for the commodity, but as a commodity which expresses in its very particularity the generality of exchange value and therefore continually changes its particular form.
When we speak of capital here, it is still only a name. The only determinateness in which capital is posited in distinction from immediate exchange value and from money, is that of exchange value maintaining and perpetuating itself in and by circulation. We have so far considered only one aspect of this quality, that of self-maintenance in and by circulation. The other, equally important, aspect is that exchange value is presupposed, no longer as simple exchange value, as it exists as a purely notional determination in the commodity before it enters into circulation, or rather as a merely intended determination, since it fleetingly becomes exchange value only in circulation; nor as exchange value as it exists as a moment in circulation, as money. It exists here as money, as objectified exchange value, but in such a way that the relation just described is posited in it.
What distinguishes the second determination from the first is that exchange value (1) exists in an objective form; (2) comes out of circulation, hence presupposes it, but simultaneously starts from itself as a premiss as against circulation.
There are two ways of expressing the result of simple circulation:
The simple negative: The commodities thrown into circulation have fulfilled their purpose. They have been exchanged for one another; each becomes the object of need and is consumed, and circulation is thereby terminated. Only money remains as simple residue. But as such a residue, money has ceased to be money, it has lost its characteristic form. It collapses into its own matter, which remains behind as the inorganic ashes of the whole process.
The positive negative: Money is negated not as objectified exchange value existing for itself — not as exchange value merely disappearing in circulation — but what is negated is its antithetical independence, its merely abstract generality in which it has established itself. However:
Thirdly: Exchange value as the premiss and at the same time the result of circulation, just as it is assumed to have emerged from it, must emerge from it again. If this happens only in a formal manner, exchange value would merely become money again; if it emerges as a real commodity, as in simple circulation, it would become a simple object of need, would be consumed as such, and would also lose its characteristic form. If the emergence from circulation is to become real, exchange value must also become an object of need and be consumed as such; but it must be consumed by labour, and in this way reproduce itself anew.
Differently expressed: As regards its content, exchange value was originally an objectified quantity of labour or labour time. As such it progressed, in the process of its objectification, through circulation until it became money, palpable money. Now it must again posit the point of departure of circulation, which lay outside of, and was presupposed by, circulation, in relation to which circulation itself appeared as a movement grasping it from outside and transforming it within itself. That is, exchange value must now posit labour; but now no longer as the simple equivalent or simple objectification of labour but as objectified exchange value become independent, which yields itself up to labour as its material, only in order to renew itself and from itself to begin circulation anew. And with that it is no longer a simple equation, a maintenance of its identity, as in circulation; but a multiplication of itself. Exchange value posits itself as exchange value only by valorising itself, i.e. by increasing its value. As capital, money (having returned from circulation to itself) has lost its rigidity, and has turned from a palpable thing into a process. But on the other hand, labour has modified its relationship to its own objectivity: it has also returned to itself. Yet the nature of the return is such that the labour objectified in exchange value posits living labour as a means for its reproduction, while originally exchange value appeared only as a product of labour.
2. Exchange Value Emerging from Circulation Becomes Its Premiss, Maintains Itself in It and Multiplies Itself by Means of Labour
y^\. (1) General concept of capital.— (2) Particularity of capital: circulating capital, fixed capital. (Capital as means of subsistence, as raw material, as instrument of labour.) (3) Capital as money.
II. (1) Quantity of capital. Accumulation.— (2) Capital measured in terms of itself. Profit. Interest. Value of capital, i.e. capital in distinction from itself as interest and profit. (3) The circulation of capitals: (a) Exchange of capital with capital. Exchange of capital with revenue. Capital and prices; (ß) Competition of capitals; (7) Concentration of capitals.
III. Capital as credit. IV. Capital as share capital. V. Capital as money market. VI. Capital as source of wealth. The capitalist. After capital, landed property would have to be dealt with. After that wage labour. Then, assuming all three, the movement of prices as circulation now defined in its inner totality. On the other hand, the three classes as production posited in its three basic forms and presuppositions of circulation. Then the State. (State and bourgeois society.— Taxation, or the existence of the unproductive classes.—The national debt.— Population.—The State in its external relations: Colonies. Foreign trade. Rate of exchange. Money as international coin.—Finally the world market. Encroach-ment of bourgeois society on the State. Crises. Dissolution of the mode of production and form of society based upon exchange value. The real positing of individual labour as social and vice versa. )f
(Nothing is more erroneous than the way in which both the economists and the socialists consider society in relation to economic conditions. Proudhon, for example, replies to Bastiat by saying ([Gratuité du crédit. Discussion entre M. Fr. Bastiat et M. Proudhon, Paris, 1850, p. 250,] XVI, 29):
"For society the distinction between capital and product does not exist. This distinction is a purely subjective one, existing only for individuals."(1)
Thus it is precisely the social aspect which he calls subjective and the subjective abstraction which he calls society. The distinction between product and capital is precisely that, as capital, the product expresses a specific relation belonging to an historical form of society. This so-called consideration from the point of view of society means nothing more than to overlook precisely the differences which express the social relation (relation of civil society). Society does not consist of individuals, but expresses the sum of the relationships and conditions in which these individuals stand to one another. As if someone were to say: for society, slaves and CITIZENS do not exist: both are men. They are both men, if we consider them outside society. To be a slave and to be a CITIZEN are social determinations, relations between human beings A and B. Human being A as such is not a slave; he is a slave in and through society. Mr. Proudhon's remarks about capital and product mean that in his view there is no distinction between capitalists and workers from the point of view of society. But actually this distinction exists only from the point of view of society.)
(Proudhon's polemic against Bastiat, Gratuité du crédit, amounts only to his wish to reduce the exchange between capital and labour to the simple exchange of commodities as exchange values, to reduce them to moments of simple circulation, i.e. he abstracts precisely from the specific distinction upon which everything depends. He says:
"Every product becomes capital at a certain moment, because everything that is consumed is at a certain moment consumed reproductively" [ibid., p. 177].
This is profoundly mistaken, BUT NEVER MIND.
"What causes the sudden transformation of the notion of product into that of capital? It is the idea of value. This means that the product, in order to become capital, must have passed through an authentic valuation, rtiust have been bought or sold, its price discussed and fixed by a kind of legal convention. Hides, for instance, coming from the butcher's shop, are the product of the butcher. Have these hides been bought by a tanner? At once he adds either them or their value to his working capital. By the work of the tanner this capital becomes a product again" [ibid., pp. 179-80].
Every capital is here "an established value". Money is the "most established value",* established value of the highest potency. This means (1) the product becomes capital by becoming value, or capital is nothing more than simple value. There is no difference between them. Therefore he says alternately "commodity" (the natural aspect of the commodity expressed as product) and "value" or rather "price", since he assumes the act of purchase and sale. (2) Since money appears as the perfected form of value, as value exists in simple circulation, money is also the true established value.)
The transition from simple exchange value and its circulation to capital may also be expressed in the following way: in circulation, exchange value appears dual — once as commodity, again as money. If it is present in one of these determinations, it is not present in the other. This is valid for every particular commodity. But the whole of circulation considered in itself consists in the same exchange value, exchange value as subject, positing itself once as commodity and again as money; it is the movement by means of which exchange value posits itself in this dual determination, and preserves itself in each of its roles as its opposite, in the commodity as money, and in money as the commodity. This is in itself present in simple circulation, but it is not posited in it. Exchange value posited as the unity of commodity and money is capital, and this positing itself appears as the circulation of capital. (But this is a spiral line, an expanding curve, not a simple circle.)
Let us first analyse the simple determinations contained in the relationship of capital and labour, in order to discover the inner connection, both of these determinations and of their further developments, to what has gone before.
[11-19] The first presupposition is that capital stands on one side and labour on the other, each as an independent entity confronting the other, and hence each also alien to the other. The labour that confronts capital is alien labour; the capital that confronts labour is alien capital. The extremes that confront each other are specifically distinct. In the first form in which simple exchange value was posited, labour was determined in such a way that its product was not immediately use value for the labourer, not his direct means of subsistence. This was the general condition for the production of exchange value and of exchange in general. Otherwise the worker would merely have produced a product — an immediate use value for himself — but not exchange value. However, this exchange value was materialised in a product, which as such had use value for others and as such was the object of their needs. The use value which the worker has to offer to capital, and hence which he has to offer to others in general, is not materialised in a product, it does not exist in any way external to him. Consequently, his use value does not exist in reality but only potentially, as his capacity. It becomes reality only when it is solicited by capital, set in motion, since activity without an object is nothing, or, at most, mental activity, with which we are not dealing here. As soon as this use value is set in motion by capital, it exists as the definite, productive activity of the worker; it is his vitality itself, directed towards a definite aim and hence manifesting itself in a definite form.
In the relationship of capital and labour, exchange value and use value are brought into relation to one another: one side (capital) faces the other above all as exchange value(2) while the other side (labour) faces capital as use value. In simple circulation, every commodity can be considered alternately in one or the other determination. In both cases, provided that it is considered as a commodity as such, it steps outside circulation as an object satisfying a need, and falls entirely outside the economic relationship. In so far as the commodity is fixed as exchange value— money — it tends towards the same formlessness, but remains within the economic relationship. In any case, commodities are of interest in the exchange relationship (simple circulation) only to the extent that they have exchange values. On the other hand, their exchange value is of only passing interest, for it transcends their one-sidedness — the fact of their usefulness, their use value, being related to, and hence immediately existing for, only one specific individual — but does not transcend this use value itself. Rather, exchange value posits and mediates use value, namely, as
there exchange is only taking place because of the reciprocal use of the commodity; and use value, i.e. the content, the natural particularity of the commodity as such, has no existence as a characteristic economic form. Rather, its characteristic form is exchange value. The content outside this form is of no consequence; it is not the content of the relationship as a social relationship. But does not this content develop as such in a system of needs and production? Does not use value as such enter into the form itself as something determining the economic form itself, e.g. in the relationship of capital and labour? in the different forms of labour? — Agriculture, industry, etc.— Rent? — Influence of the seasons on the price of primary products? etc. If only exchange value as such played a role in political economy, how could there be introduced at a later stage such elements as relate purely to use value, e.g. in the case of capital considered as raw material, etc.? How does the physical quality of the soil suddenly turn up in Ricardo? etc. The [German] word Waare ["commodity"] implies the relation (the German Güter ["goods"] perhaps best be taken in the sense of [the French] denrée as opposed to merchandise?). Price appears as a merely formal-determination in it. This is quite compatible with exchange value being the predominant determination. Obviously, the element of use does not cease to exist because it is only determined by exchange, although the direction of use is of course determined in this way. In any case, this question should be examined thoroughly in the investigation of value. One should not completely abstract from it, as does Ricardo, nor give oneself airs by merely presupposing the word "utility",[78] as does the insipid Say. Above all, it will and must be shown, in the analysis of the individual sections, to what extent use value not only remains outside political economy and its characteristic forms as a presupposed matter but to what extent it enters into them. For Proudhon's insipidities see my Misère?® This much is certain: in exchange, we have (in circulation) the commodity — use value — as price; that apart from its price it is a commodity, the object of need, goes without saying. The two determinations do not enter into any relationship at all to each other, except in so far as the particular use [value] appears as a natural limit of the commodity, and hence posits money, i.e. the commodity's exchange value, simultaneously as existence of the commodity in money outside itself, but only formally. Money itself is a commodity, it has a use value as its substance.
use value for others, etc. But in so far as exchange value as such is fixed in money, use value confronts it merely as an abstract chaos; and it is precisely by being separated from its substance that exchange value collapses and drifts out of the sphere of simple exchange value, whose highest movement is simple circulation and whose highest perfection is money. But within the sphere of simple exchange value itself, the distinction exists IN FACT only as a superficial difference, a purely formal distinction. Money in its maximum fixation is itself commodity, and is distinguished as such from other commodities only by the fact that it expresses exchange value more perfectly. But precisely by doing so, by being coin, [11-20] it loses its immanent determination as exchange value and becomes mere use value, even if it be use value for the purpose of positing the price, etc., of commodities. The two determinations are still directly coincident in it and equally directly fall apart. Where they behave independently to one another, positively, as in the case of the commodity which becomes an object of consumption, it ceases to be a moment of the economic process; where negatively, as in money, it becomes madness; madness, however, as a moment of political economy, and a factor determining the practical life of peoples.
We have seen earlier[3] that exchange value cannot be said to realise itself in simple circulation. But this is so because [in simple circulation] use value as such does not confront exchange value. Use value is not here determined as such by exchange value. Conversely, use value as such stands in no relation to exchange value, but turns into a specific exchange value only by the application of the common feature of use values — their being labour time — as an external yardstick to them. As yet the unity of use value and exchange value directly falls apart, and their distinctness still fuses directly into unity. It must now be posited that use value becomes use value by virtue of its being exchange value, and that exchange value mediates itself through use value. In money circulation, we had only two different forms of exchange value (price of the commodity — money) or only different use values (C — C), for which money, exchange value, was merely a fleeting mediator. A real relationship between exchange value and use value did not occur. And for that reason the commodity as such — its particularity — is an irrelevant, a merely fortuitous content conceived only in general and falling outside the relation of economic form. Or else the latter is only a
See this volume, p. 191.— Ed.
superficial form, a formal determination, outside whose field the real substance lies and which has no relationship at all to this real substance as such. Consequently, if this formal determination as such is to be fixed in money, it surreptitiously transforms itself into an indifferent natural product, a metal, in which whatever remained of a relationship, whether to the individual or to the intercourse of individuals, has been extinguished. Metal as such does not, of course, express any social relations; the form of coin, the last sign of life of its social significance, is also extinguished in it.
Exchange value which confronts use value posited as one side of the relationship, confronts it as money; but money confronting it in this way is no longer money in its determination as such, but money as capital. The use value or commodity confronting capital or posited exchange value is no longer the commodity as it appeared as against money, when its specific form was quite as irrelevant as its content, and when it merely appeared as any substance whatsoever.
(1) Firstly [the commodity now appears] as use value for capital, i.e. as an object which can be exchanged for capital without the latter losing its value dimension as e.g. money does when it is exchanged for a particular commodity. The only utility which an object in general can have for capital can only be to maintain it or to augment it. We have already seen, in the case of money, that value having become independent as such — or the general form of wealth — is incapable of any movement other than a quantitative one; it can only increase itself. According to its concept it is the essence of all use values; yet as always being merely a definite quantity of money (here capital) its quantitative limitation contradicts its quality. Hence it lies in its nature constantly to exceed its own limits. (As something to be enjoyed, wealth consequently appears as limitless prodigality, as e.g. in the time of the Roman emperors by the devouring of salads of pearls, etc. Here the attempt is made to realise a fantasy of enjoyment without limits.) That is why increase coincides with self-preservation in the case of value which adheres to its nature as value, and it preserves itself only by constantly striving to exceed its quantitative limits, which contradict its characteristic form, its inner generality.
Hence enrichment is an end in itself. The activity corresponding to the purpose of capital can only be that of enrichment, i.e. that of its own increase and multiplication. A specific sum of money (and money always exists for its owner only in a specific quantity, always as a specific sum of money) (this should already be shown in the chapter on money) may completely suffice for a specific volume of consumption, as a result of which it ceases to be money. But as the representative of general wealth, it cannot so suffice. As a quantitatively determined, limited sum it is only a limited representative of general wealth or the representative of a limited wealth which corresponds exactly to its exchange value, is exactly measured by it. Thus it does not by any means have the capacity which it should have according to its general concept: that of being able to buy all pleasures, all commodities, the totality of material substances of wealth. It is not a "précis de toutes les choses",(3) etc. Fixed as wealth, as the general form of wealth, as value which counts as value, it is therefore the constant impulse to exceed its quantitative limits: an endless process. Its own vitality consists exclusively of that; it maintains itself only as exchange value which is distinct from use value and valid for itself, only by constantly multiplying itself.
(It is damned difficult for our economists to explain theoretically how we get from the self-preservation of value in capital to its multiplication, i.e. to explain the latter as inherent in the fundamental determination of capital, and not merely as an accident or a result. See e.g. how Storch brings in this fundamental determination with an adverb, "actually".[80] Admittedly, the economists try to introduce this increase into the relationship of capital as an essential aspect. But if this is not done in the brutal form of defining capital as that which yields profit, in which case the very increase of capital is already posited as a particular economic form in profit, [11-21] it only appears surreptitiously and very feebly, as we shall later demonstrate, by a brief review of all that the economists have offered us concerning the definition of the concept of capital. The drivel to the effect that no one would employ his capital without obtaining a profit thereby, amounts either to the idiocy that the worthy capitalists would remain capitalists even without employing their capital; or to the very simple-minded assertion that the profit-bearing employment of capital is inherent in the very concept of capital. WELL. That is just what would then have to be demonstrated.)
Money as a sum of money is measured by its quantity. This measurableness contradicts its determination, which must be oriented towards what has no measure. Everything said about money here, is even more true of capital, in which money in its perfected determination really first develops. Only that which increases it, multiplies it, and therefore preserves it as capital, can represent use value, i.e. usefulness, to capital as such.
(2) Capital, according to its concept, is money, but money that no longer exists in the simple form of gold and silver, nor as money in opposition to circulation, but in the form of all substances — commodities. To that extent therefore it does not, as capital, stand in opposition to use value, but exists apart from money only in use values. Its substances themselves are therefore now transitory, which would have no exchange value if they had no use value; but which lose their value as use values, are dissolved simply by the natural exchange of matter, if they are not actually used; and which, if actually used, disappear all the more. In this regard, the opposite of capital cannot itself be a particular commodity; for as such it does not constitute an antithesis to capital, since the substance of capital itself is use value; since it is not this or that commodity, but every commodity. The common substance of all commodities, i.e. their substance once again not as their material stuff, as physical determination, but their common substance as commodities and therefore as exchange values, is that they are objectified labour.
^"But it can only be a question of this economic (social) substance of use values, i.e. their economic determination as content in distinction from their form (but this form is value, because specific quantity of this labour), if one is looking for the antithesis to them. So far as their natural differences are concerned, none of them excludes capital from entering into it and making it capital's own body, so long as none of them excludes the character of exchange value and commodity.^
The only thing distinct from objectified labour is non-objectified labour, labour still objectifying itself, labour as subjectivity. Or objectified labour, i.e. labour present in space, can also be opposed as past labour to labour still present in time. If it is to be present in time, present alive, it can only be present as a living subject, in which it exists as capacity, as potentiality; therefore as worker. The only use value, therefore, which can constitute an antithesis to capital is labour ^ t o be exact, value-creating, i.e. productive labour. This is an anticipation; must first be developed; BY AND BY. Labour as mere service for the satisfaction of immediate needs has nothing at all to do with capital, which does not seek this kind of labour. If a capitalist hires a woodcutter to cut wood to roast his mutton, both his relationship to the woodcutter and that of the woodcutter to him is one of simple exchange. The woodcutter gives him a service, a use value that does not increase capital but in which it is consumed, and the capitalist gives him another commodity in exchange in the form of money. Such is the case with all services which workers exchange directly for the money of other people and which are consumed by these people. This is consumption of revenue, which as such is always part of simple circulation, not consumption of capital. Since one of the contract-ing parties does not confront the other as capitalist, this form of service cannot come into the category of productive labour. From the harlot to the Pope there is a mass of such rabble. But the honest and "working" Lumpenproletariat, too, belongs to this category, e.g. the large mob of casual day-labourers, etc., in ports, etc. The person representing money requires the service only for its use value, which immediately disappears for him; but the casual labourer demands the money and since in this way the person supplying money is concerned with the commodity, and the person supplying the commodity is concerned with the money, they merely represent the two sides of simple circulation to one another. It is always clear that the casual labourer, who is concerned with the money, hence directly with the general form of wealth, seeks to enrich himself at the expense of his improvised friend, which hurts the latter, a HARD CALCULATOR, all the more, as the service he now requires is to be ascribed only to his ordinary human weaknesses, but is in no way required by him qua capitalist. A. Smith was essentially right with his distinction between productive and unproductive labour, right from the standpoint of bourgeois political economy.[3] The arguments advanced against it by other economists are either rot (e.g. Storch, Senior still more pitiable,[81] etc.), namely that any action after all acts upon something, thus confusion of the product in its natural and economic sense. According to this a criminal is also a productive worker, since he [11-22] indirectly produces books on criminal law (at least this reasoning as sound as if a judge is called a productive worker because he protects from theft). Or the modern economists have become such sycophants of the bourgeois, that they wish to make him believe that it is productive labour if someone picks the lice out of his hair, or strokes his tail, because the latter activity might make his fat head — BLOCKHEAD — clearer the next day for the office. It is therefore quite correct — but at the same time also characteristic— that for the consistent economists the workers in e.g. luxury shops are productive, although the fellows who consume such objects are
a A. Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Book 2, Ch. III.— Ed.
explicitly castigated as unproductive wastrels. The FACT is that these workers are INDEED productive AS FAR AS THEY INCREASE THE CAPITAL OF THEIR
MASTER; UNPRODUCTIVE AS TO THE MATERIAL RESULT OF THEIR LABOUR. I N FACT, t h i s "productive" worker is just as interested in the shit which he must make as the capitalist who employs him, and who does not give a damn about the junk. But looked at more precisely, it turns out in fact that the true definition of a productive worker consists in this: a man who requires and demands absolutely no more than is necessary to enable him to bring to his capitalist the greatest possible advantage. ALL THIS NONSENSE. Digression. But have to return to the productive and unproductive in more detail later.[82],/'
Exchange between Capital and Labour
Use value confronting capital as posited exchange value is labour. Capital exchanges itself, or exists in this specific form only in relation to non-capital, the negation of capital, in respect to which alone it is capital; the real non-capital is labour.
If we consider the exchange between capital and labour, we find that it is divided into two processes which are not only formally but qualitatively distinct and even contradictory:
(1) The worker exchanges his commodity, labour, the use value which as a commodity also has a price like all other commodities, for a specific sum of exchange values, specific sum of money, which capital cedes to him.
(2) The capitalist obtains, in exchange, labour itself, labour as value-positing activity, as productive labour; i.e. he obtains the productive power which maintains and multiplies capital and which therefore becomes the productive power and reproducing power of capital, a power belonging to capital itself.
The separation of these two processes is so evident that they can fall asunder in time and need in no way coincide. The first process can be completed, and in most cases is to a certain extent completed, before the second has even begun. The completion of the second act implies the completion of the product. The payment of wages cannot wait for this. We shall even find it an essential characteristic of the relationship [between worker and capitalist] that it does not do so.
In simple exchange, circulation, this two-fold process does not occur. If commodity a is exchanged for money b, and this then for commodity c which is destined for consumption — the original object of the exchange for a—the use of commodity c, its consumption, falls quite outside circulation; does not concern the form of the [economic] relationship; lies beyond circulation itself, and is a purely physical interest which now only expresses a relationship of individual A in his natural quality to an object of his individual need. What he does with commodity c is a question that lies outside the economic relationship.
Here, on the contrary, the use value of what is exchanged for money appears as a particular economic relationship, and the specific utilisation of what is exchanged for money constitutes the ultimate purpose of both processes. Thus there is already a distinction of form between the exchange of capital and labour and simple exchange—two distinct processes.
If we now investigate further how the exchange between capital and labour differs in content from simple exchange (circulation), we find that this distinction does not arise from an external relation or comparison, but that in the totality of the latter process the second form distinguishes itself from the first, that the comparison itself is included. The difference of the second act from the first — the particular process of appropriation of labour on the part of capital is the second act — is EXACTLY the distinction between the exchange of capital and labour and the exchange of commodities as mediated by money. In the exchange between capital and labour, the first act is an exchange and falls wholly within ordinary circulation; the second is a process qualitatively different from exchange and it is only BY MISUSE that it could have been called exchange of any kind at all. It stands directly opposed to exchange; essentially different category.
^Capital. I. Generality: (1) (a) Evolution of capital from money, (b) Capital and labour (mediating itself by alien labour), (c) The elements of capital, distinguished according to their relationship to labour (product, raw material, instrument of labour). (2) Particularisation of capital: (a) Circulating capital, fixed capital. Turnover of capital. (3) Singularity of capital: Capital and profit. Capital and interest. Capital as value, distinct from itself as interest and profit.
II. Particularity: (1) Accumulation of capitals. (2) Competition of capitals. (3) Concentration of capitals (quantitative difference of capital as at the same time qualitative, as measure of its volume and effect).[3]
a Here the following passage is crossed out in the manuscript: "(b) Capital as credit, (c) Share capital, (d) The money market, (e) Capital as determining price."—Ed.
[11-23] III. Singularity. (1) Capital as credit. (2) Capital as share capital. (3) Capital as money market.
In the money market, capital is posited in its totality; there it determines price, provides work, regulates production, in a word, source of production; but capital, not only as something producing itself (materially by means of industry, etc., positing price, developing the productive forces), but at the same time as creator of values, must posit a value or form of wealth specifically distinct from capital. This is rent. It is the only value created by capital as value distinct from itself, and from its own production. Both by its nature and historically, capital is the creator of modern landed property, of rent; just as its action therefore appears also as the dissolution of the old form of landed property. The new form arises from the action of capital on the old. Capital is this — in one respect — as creator of modern agriculture. In the economic relationships of modern landed property which appears as a process: rent — capital — wage labour (the form of the series can also be otherwise conceived as: wage labour — capital — rent; but capital must always be the active middle element), the inner structure of modern society, or capital in the totality of its relations, is therefore posited.
The question now is: how does the transition from landed property to wage labour come about? (The transition from wage labour to capital comes about of itself; for capital here has returned into its active ground.) Historically, the transition is indisputable. It is already implied in the fact that [modern] landed property is the product of capital. We thus always find that wherever the reaction of capital on the older forms of landed property converts the latter into money rent (the same thing occurs in other ways, where the modern farmer is created) and agriculture therefore, carried on by capital, is converted into industrial agronomy, the COTTIERS, serfs, villeins, copyholders, cottagers, etc., necessarily become day-labourers, wage labourers. Thus wage labour in its totality is first created by the action of capital upon landed property, and later, as soon as this has been elaborated as a form, by the landowner himself. The landowner himself then CLEARS the land, as Steuart says,(1) of its superfluous mouths, rips the children of the earth away from the breast on which they were raised, and so converts even labour on the land, which appears by its nature as immediate source of subsistence, into a mediated source of subsistence, purely dependent on social relations. (The mutual dependence must first have developed into its pure form, before there can be any question of a real social communality [Gemeinschaftlichkeitj. All relations as posited by society, not as determined by nature.) This alone makes possible the application of science and the full development of productive power.
There can therefore be no doubt that wage labour in its classical form, as permeating the whole extent of society, and making itself in lieu of the soil the ground on which society rests, is first created by modern landed property, i.e. by landed property as a value created by capital itself. This is why landed property leads back to wage labour. It is in one respect nothing but the transference of wage labour from the towns to the countryside, therefore wage labour spread over the whole surface of society. The old landowner, if he is rich, does not require a capitalist to become a modern landowner. He only has to convert his labourers into wage labourers and to begin producing for profit instead of revenue. Then the modern tenant farmer and the modern landowner are presumed in his person. But it is not a formal distinction, that the form in which he receives his revenue or the form in which the labourer is paid, is changed; it implies, rather, a total transformation of the mode of production (of agriculture) itself; it therefore presupposes a particular level of development of industry, of trade and of science, in short of the productive forces.
In general, production based upon capital and wage labour is not only formally different from other modes of production, but also presupposes a total revolution and development of material production. Although capital as merchant capital can develop itself fully (only not to the same extent quantitatively) without this transformation of landed property, it cannot do so as industrial capital. Even the development of manufacture presupposes an incipient-dissolution of the old economic relationships of landed property. On the other hand, it is not until modern industry is developed to a high degree that this dissolution at individual points becomes the new form in its totality and full extent; but this development itself always proceeds the more quickly, the higher the development of modern agriculture, of the form of property, of the economic relationships corresponding to it. Thus England in this respect the model country for other, continental countries.
Equally: if the first form of industry, large-scale manufacture, already presupposes the dissolution of landed property, this dissolution, in turn, is determined by the subordinate development of capital in its still undeveloped (medieval) forms, which has taken place in the towns, and at the same time by the effect of manufacture flourishing together with trade in other countries (thus Holland's influence upon England in the 16th and the first half of the 17th centuries). In these countries themselves the process already gone through and agriculture sacrificed to stock-raising, and grain imported from backward countries, like Poland, etc. (Holland AGAIN).
It must be kept in mind that the new productive forces and relations of production do not develop out of nothing, or out of thin air, or from the womb of the Idea positing itself, but within and in contradiction to the existing development of production and inherited, traditional property relations. If in the fully developed bourgeois system each economic relationship presupposes the other in a bourgeois-economic form, and everything posited is thus also a premiss, that is the case with every [11-24] organic system. This organic system itself has its premisses as a totality, and its development into a totality consists precisely in subordinating all elements of society to itself, or in creating out of it the organs it still lacks. This is historically how it becomes a totality. Its becoming this totality constitutes a moment of its process, of its development.
On the other hand, if, within a society, the modern relations of production, i.e. capital, are developed in their totality, and this society now takes possession of a new terrain, as e.g. in the colonies, it finds, more especially its representative the capitalist finds, that his capital ceases to be capital without wage labour, and that one of the premisses of wage labour is not only landed property in general but modern landed property; landed property which, as capitalised rent, is expensive and as such excludes the direct utilisation of the soil by individuals. Therefore Wakefield's theory of colonisation, followed in practice by the English government in Australia. Landed property is here artificially raised in price in order to transform the workers into wage workers, to make capital act as capital, and thus to make the new colony productive; to develop wealth in it, instead of, as in America, using it for the direct provision of wage workers. Wakefield's theory is immensely important for a correct understanding of modern landed property.[83]
Capital, as a producer of rent, thus returns to the production of wage labour as its general creative ground. Capital arises from circulation and posits labour as wage labour; thus it takes form, and developed as a whole it posits landed property both as its condition and as its antithesis. But it turns out that in doing this, it has only created wage labour as its general premiss. This, therefore, must now be considered for itself. On the other hand, modern landed property itself appears at its most powerful in the process of the CLEARING OF ESTATES and the transformation of the rural labourers into wage labourers.
Thus two-fold transition to wage labour. This the positive side. Negatively, after capital has posited landed property and thereby achieved its two-fold aim: (1) industrial agriculture and thereby development of the productivity of the soil and (2) wage labour, therefore the general domination of capital on the land, it considers the existence of landed property itself as a purely transitory development, which is necessary as the action of capital on the old relationships of landed property, and is a product of their decomposition; but which as such — once this aim has been achieved — is merely a restriction on profit, not a necessity for production. Capital therefore seeks to dissolve landed property as private property and to transfer it to the State. This the negative side. Thus to transform the whole internal society into capitalists and wage labourers.
When capital has reached this point, wage labour has as well, and tries, like the bourgeois, to get rid of the landlords as supererogatory in order to simplify the relationship, to moderate taxes, etc., on the one hand; and on the other, in order to escape from wage labour and to become independent producer — for direct use — it demands the break-up of the great landed estates. Landed property is here negated from two directions; the negation from the direction of capital is only a change of form, to its undivided rule. (Rent as the general State rent (State tax), so that bourgeois society reproduces the medieval system in another way, but as the complete negation of it.) The negation from the direction of wage labour is only a hidden negation of capital, and therefore also of wage labour itself. It is now to be considered as independently confronting capital.
Thus the transition two-fold: (1) positive transition from modern landed property or transition of capital by means of modern landed property to general wage labour; (2) negative transition: negation of landed property by capital, i.e. negation of independent value by capital, i.e. precisely negation of capital by itself. But their negation is wage labour. Then negation of landed property and by means of it negation of capital from the direction of wage labour, i.e. wage labour that wishes to posit itself as independent.^ , / T h e market, which at the beginning in political economy appears as abstract determination, assumes total forms. First the money market. This includes the bill of exchange market; in general the loan market; therefore dealings in money, bullion market. As money-lending market, it appears both in the banks, FOR INSTANCE in the rate of discount: LOAN-MARKET, BILL-BROKERS, etc.; but then also as the market for all interest-bearing bills: state bonds and the SHARE MARKET. T h e latter fall into larger groups. Firstly the SHARES of the monetary institutes themselves; BANK SHARES; JOINTSTOCK BANK SHARES; means of communication SHARES (RAILWAY SHARES the most important; CANAL
SHARES; STEAM NAVIGATION SHARES; TELEGRAPH SHARES; OMNIBUS SHARES); SHARES of general industrial ENTERPRISES (MINING SHARES the main ones). Then for the supply of the general elements (GAS SHARES, SHARES in water-works). MISCELLANEOUS going into thousands. For the storing of commodities (DOCK SHARES, etc.). MISCELLANEOUS in infinite variety, such as ENTERPRISES of industrial or commercial companies based on shares. Finally for securing the whole, INSURANCE SHARES of all kinds.
Just as the market by and large divides itself into the HOME MARKET and the FOREIGN MARKET, so the domestic market itself divides further into MARKET OF HOME SHARES, NATIONAL FUNDS, etc., and FOREIGN FUNDS, FOREIGN [11-25] SHARES, etc. But this development really belongs to the world market, which is not only the domestic market in relation to all the FOREIGN MARKETS existing outside it, but at the same time the domestic market of all FOREIGN MARKETS, as, in turn, components of the HOME
MARKET.
T h e concentration of the money market in one main place within a country, whereas the other markets distribute themselves more according to the division of labour; although here also great concentration in the capital city, if this is also the port for its exports.
The markets distinct from the money market are in the first place as different as are the products and branches of production, and likewise constitute markets in their own right. T h e main markets for these different products establish themselves in centres which are such either in relation to import or export, or because they are either themselves centres of a particular production or the direct points of supply for such centres. But from this simple distinction, the markets proceed further to a more or less organic separation into large groups, which themselves necessarily divide u p according to the basic elements of capital into: markets for products and markets for raw materials. T h e instrument of production as such constitutes no particular market; it exists as such mainly, first, in the raw materials themselves, which are sold as means of production; but then in particular in the metals, since these exclude all thought of direct consumption, and then in products such as coal, oil, chemical materials, which are destined to disappear as accessory means of production. Likewise dyestuffs, timber, DRUGS, etc. Accordingly: I. Products. (1) Grain market, with its different subdivisions, e.g. SEED market: rice, sago, potatoes, etc. This economically very important; at the same time market for production and for direct consumption. (2) COLONIAL-PRODUCE MARKET. Coffee, tea, cocoa, sugar; tobacco; SPICES (pepper, all-spice, CINNAMON, cassia lignea, CLOVES, GINGER, MACE, NUTMEGS, etc.). (3) Fruits. ALMONDS, CURRANTS, FIGS, PLUMS, PRUNES, RAISINS, ORANGES, LEMONS, etc. MOLASSES (for production, etc.). (4) Provisions. Butter; CHEESE; BACON; HAMS; LARD; PORK; BEEF (smoked); fish, etc. (5) SPIRITS. Wine, rum, beer, etc.
II. Raw produce. (1) Raw materials of the mechanised industry. Flax; hemp; cotton; silk; wool; hides; leather; gutta percha, etc. (2) Raw materials of the chemical industry. Potash, SALTPETRE; turpentine; nitrate OF soda, etc.
III. Raw materials which are at the same time instruments of production: Metals (copper, iron, tin, zinc, lead, steel, etc.). Wood. [Fire] WOOD. TIMBER. Dyer's wood. Timber for ship-building, etc. Accessory means of production and raw materials. DRUGS and DYES (cochineal, indigo, etc.). Tar. Tallow. Oils. Coal, etc.[84]
Each product must naturally enter the market; but really large markets, as distinct from retail trade, are formed only by the important products for consumption (economically important only the market for grain, tea, sugar and COFFEE; wine-market to some extent and the market for spirits in general) or those which are the raw materials of industry (wool, silk, wood, metal-market, etc.). At which point the abstract category of the market has to be brought in, will become clear later . ^
The exchange between the worker and the capitalist is a simple exchange; each obtains an equivalent; the one money, the other a commodity whose price is exactly equal to the money paid for it. What the capitalist receives in this simple exchange is a use value: disposition over alien labour. From the worker's side — and this is the exchange in which he appears as seller — it is evident that for him, as for the seller of any other commodity, of a use value, the use the buyer makes of the purchased commodity does not concern the characteristic form of the relationship. What the worker sells is the disposition over his labour, which is a specific labour, specific skill, etc.
It is quite immaterial what the capitalist does with his labour, although he can naturally employ it only according to its specific characteristics and his disposition itself is limited to only a specific labour and is restricted in time (so much labour time). The system of piece-rate payment, it is true, makes it appear that the worker receives a certain share in the product. But this is only another form of measuring time. (Instead of saying, you will work for 12 hours, it is said, you will receive so much per piece; i.e. we measure the time you have worked by the quantity of the products.) This does not at all concern us here, where we are considering the general relationship.
If the capitalist were to content himself with the mere right of disposing, without actually setting the worker to work, e.g. in order to have his labour as a reserve, etc.,or to take away the right of disposing over that labour from his competitors (as e.g. theatre directors purchase singers for a SEASON, not to let them sing but so that they do not sing in a rival theatre), the exchange would have taken place in full. The worker receives the exchange value in money, the general form of wealth in a definite quantity, and the more or less he receives procures for him a greater or smaller share in general wealth. How this more or less is determined, how the quantity of money he obtains is measured, concerns the general relationship so little that it cannot be deduced from it as such. In general, the exchange value of his commodity can only be determined not by the way in which the buyer uses his commodity but only by the quantity of objectified labour present in the commodity itself; here, therefore, by the quantity of labour required to produce the worker himself. For the use value which [11-26] he offers exists only as ability, as his bodily capacity; it has no existence outside of that. The objectified labour necessary both to maintain the general substance in which his labour capacity[85]
exists, i.e. bodily to maintain the worker himself, as well as to modify this general substance for the development of the particular capacity — that is the labour objectified in this substance. This, in general terms, is the measure of the quantity of value, the sum of money, which he receives in exchange. This is not yet the place for the further development of the argument as to how the wages of labour are determined like [the value of] all other commodities by the labour time necessary to produce the worker as such.
In circulation, when I exchange a commodity for money and for that money purchase a commodity and satisfy my need, the act is at an end. So it is with the worker. But he has the possibility to start again from the beginning, because his life is the source constantly renewing his own use value for a certain time, until it is used up, and constantly confronts capital again, in order to begin the same exchange anew. As in the case of every individual standing in circulation as subject, the worker is the owner of a use value; he disposes of it for money, the general form of wealth, but only in order to dispose of this money in turn for commodities as objects of his immediate consumption, as the means for the satisfaction of his needs. Since he exchanges his use value for the general form of wealth, he shares in the enjoyment of general wealth up to the limit of his equivalent — a quantitative limit which, of course, changes into a qualitative one, as in every exchange. But he is not restricted to particular objects, nor to a particular kind of satisfaction. The range of his enjoyments is not limited qualitatively, but only quantitatively. This distinguishes him from the slave, serf, etc.
Consumption CERTAINLY reacts back upon production; but this reaction concerns the worker in his exchange as little as it does every other seller of a commodity; rather, from the standpoint of simple circulation — and as yet we have no other developed relationship before us — it falls outside the economic relationship. This much, however, can already be said in passing: that the relative limitation of the range of the workers' consumption, which is only quantitative, not qualitative, or rather qualitative only as posited by quantity, gives them as consumers (in the course of the further analysis of capital, the relationship of consumption and production must, in general, be considered more closely) a quite different importance as agents of production from that which they possess and possessed in e.g. ancient world, in the Middle Ages or in Asia. But all this does not belong here, as we have already said.
Equally, while the worker receives his equivalent in the form of money, in the form of general wealth, he figures in this exchange as the equal of the capitalist, like every other exchanger; at least, in appearance. In FACT, this equality is already disturbed in that his relationship as worker to the capitalist, as use value in the form specifically distinct from exchange value, in contrast to the value posited as value, is presupposed for this apparently simple exchange. He therefore already stands in a differently determined economic relationship — outside that of exchange, in which the nature of the use value, the particular use value of the commodity as such, is immaterial.
This appearance, however, exists as an illusion on his part and to a certain extent on the other side, and therefore essentially
9-852 modifies his relationship by comparison to that of labourers in other social modes of production. But, what is essential is that the aim of the exchange for him is the satisfaction of his need. The object of his exchange is the immediate object of need, not exchange value as such. True, he receives money, but only in its determination as coin; i.e. only as a self-transcending and vanishing mediator. What he gets in exchange is therefore not exchange value, not wealth, but means of subsistence, objects to sustain his life, satisfaction of his needs in general, of his physical, social, etc., needs. It is a specific equivalent in means of subsistence, objectified labour, measured by the production costs of his labour.
What he gives up is the right of disposition over his labour. On the other hand, it is true that even within simple circulation, coin may develop into money and that, therefore, in so far as he receives coin in exchange, he can convert it into money, by accumulating it, etc., withdrawing it from circulation; fixing it as general form of wealth, instead of as vanishing means of exchange. In this respect it could thus be said that, in the exchange of the worker with capital, his object — and therefore also the product of the exchange for him — is not means of subsistence but wealth, not a particular use value, but exchange value as such. According to this, the worker could make exchange value into his own product in the only way wealth can appear at all as product of simple circulation in which equivalents are exchanged, namely by sacrificing substantial satisfaction to the form of wealth, i.e. by self-denial, saving, cutting down his consumption, and thus withdrawing less from circulation than he puts into it in goods. This is the only possible form for enriching oneself which is posited by circulation itself.
Self-denial could then also appear in the more active form, not posited in simple circulation, of denying himself more and more rest, thus sacrificing altogether his existence as distinct from his existence as worker, and being as much as possible only a worker; thus renewing the act of exchange more often, or extending it quantitatively further, in other words, by industriousness. Thus in present-day society, the demand for industriousness and especially also for saving, for self-denial, is addressed not to the capitalists but to the workers, and especially by the [11-27] capitalists. Present-day society makes the paradoxical demand that he for whom the object of exchange is means of subsistence should deny himself, not he for whom it is enrichment. The illusion as if the capitalists in fact practised "self-denial"—and thereby became capitalists — a demand and a notion which made any sense at all only in the early period when capital was emerging from feudal, etc., relationships — has been abandoned by all serious modern economists. The worker is told to save, and much fuss has been made with savings banks, etc.
(As regards the latter, even the economists concede that their real purpose is not wealth, but only a more appropriate distribution of expenditure, so that in old age, or in sickness, crises, etc., the workers do not become a burden on the poorhouses, on the State, or go begging (in a word, so that they become a burden on the working class itself and not by any means on the capitalists, vegetating on the latter's pocket); i.e. so that they save for the capitalists and reduce the costs of production for them.)
Still, not a single economist will deny that, if the workers acted on this demand in general, that is as workers (what the individual worker, in distinction from his genus, does or can do, can only exist as an exception, not as the rule, because it is not determined by the relationship itself), hence if they acted on this demand as a rule (apart from the damage they would do to general consumption— the loss would be enormous — therefore also to production, therefore also to the number and volume of exchanges that they could make with capital, therefore to themselves as workers), they would employ means which would absolutely negate their own end, and which would inevitably degrade them to the level of the Irish, to that level of wage labourers where the merest animal minimum of needs and means of subsistence appears as the sole object and purpose of their exchange with capital.
In aspiring to wealth instead of use value, the worker would not only not enrich himself but also lose the use value into the bargain. For as a rule the maximum of industriousness and of labour, and the minimum of consumption — and this amounts to the maximum of his self-denial and his money-making — could lead to nothing else than that he would receive a minimum of wages for a maximum of labour. By his exertion he would only have diminished the general level of the costs of production of his own labour and thereby its general price. It is only as an exception that the worker, by means of will-power, physical strength and endurance, parsimoniousness, etc., can convert his coin into money, as an exception from his class and from the general conditions of his existence.
If all or the majority are over-industrious (in so far as industriousness is left to their own discretion at all in modern
9* industry, which is not the case in the most important and most developed branches of production), they do not increase the value of their commodity, but only its quantity; that is, the demands which would be imposed on them as use value. If they all save, a general reduction of wages will soon put them back on the right foot. For such general saving would show the capitalist that their wages were in general too high, that they were receiving more than the equivalent for their commodity, the right to dispose over their labour; for it is precisely the essence of simple exchange— and they stand in this relation towards the capitalist — that no one throws more into circulation than he withdraws from it, but also that no one can withdraw more than he has thrown in.
An individual worker can be industrious above the necessary level, more industrious than is necessary to live as a worker, only because another is below the level, is lazier. He can save only because and if another squanders. The most he can attain on average with his frugality is to be better able to endure the adjustment of prices — high and low, their circuit; that is only to distribute his enjoyments more appropriately, not to acquire wealth. And that is actually what the capitalists demand. The workers should save enough in times of good business to be able to more or less live in bad times, to endure SHORT TIME or the reduction of wages, etc. (The wage would then fall still lower.) It really amounts to the demand that they should always make do with a minimum of pleasures of life and make crises easier, etc., for the capitalists; that they should consider themselves as pure labouring machines, and pay as much as possible of their WEAR AND TEAR themselves. Apart from the sheer brutalisation to which this would lead — and this brutalisation would itself make it impossible even to strive for wealth in its general form, as money, as accumulated money—(and the worker's participation in higher, including spiritual, pleasures, agitation for his own interests, subscription to newspapers, attending lectures, educating his children, developing his taste, etc., his only share in civilisation, which distinguishes him from the slave, is economically possible only by his extension of the range of his enjoyments in times of good business, that is at the times when saving is possible to a certain degree)—apart from this, if he truly saved in this ascetic fashion, and so accumulated premiums for the Lumpenproletariat, the rogues, etc., whose number would grow in proportion to demand, he would merely be able to preserve his savings — if they went beyond the saving-boxes of the official savings banks, which pay him a minimum of interest so that the capitalists make a large interest on them or the State consumes them, whereby he only increases the power of his opponents and his own dependence — he would be able to preserve and gain from his savings only if he put them into banks, etc., so that he afterwards loses his deposits in times of crises, while in times of prosperity he has abstained from all the pleasures of life in order to expand the power of capital. Thus he has in every way saved for capital, not [11-28] for himself.
Moreover — in so far as the whole thing is not a hypocritical pretence of bourgeois "philanthropy", which in general consists in fobbing the workers off with "pious wishes"—each capitalist certainly demands that his workers should save, but only his own, because they confront him as workers; but by no means the remaining world of workers, because they confront him as consumers. IN SPITE of all "pious" phrases, he therefore tries to find all kinds of means to spur them on to consumption, to endow his commodities with new attractions, to talk the workers into feeling new needs, etc. It is precisely this aspect of the relationship between capital and labour which is an essential moment of civilisation, and upon which rests the historical justification but also the present power of capital. (This relationship between production and consumption is only to be developed later, under capital and profit, etc., or also under accumulation and competition of capitals.)
These are nevertheless all exoteric considerations, relevant here in so far as the demands of hypocritical bourgeois philanthropy are shown to be self-negating and therefore to prove precisely what they are meant to refute: that in the exchange between the worker and capital, the worker finds himself in the relationship of simple circulation, therefore does not obtain wealth, but only subsistence, use values for immediate consumption. That the demand contradicts the relationship itself, emerges from the simple reflection (We shall deal with the demand, recently advanced occasionally with self-complacency, to give the workers a certain share in profit, in the section on the wages of labour; except as special bonus which can fulfil its purpose only as an exception to the rule, and which is IN FACT virtually restricted to the buying of individual OVERLOOKERS, etc., in the interest of the employer against that of their own class; or to [the employment of] salesmen, etc., in short no longer common workers, in which case it no longer affects the general relationship. Or it is a special way of cheating the workers and withholding part of their wages in the more precarious form of a profit depending on the state of the business.) that if the saving of the worker is not to remain a simple product of circulation — saved-up money which can only be realised by being converted sooner or later into the substantial content of wealth, enjoyments — the accumulated money itself would have to become capital, i.e. would have to buy labour, to relate to labour as use value. It thus again presupposes labour which is not capital, and presupposes that labour has turned into its opposite — non-labour. The worker's saving, in order to become capital, implies labour as non-capital in contrast to capital. Therefore the contradiction which was supposed to have been overcome at one point, would reappear at another point.
If, then, in the original relation itself the object and the product of the exchange of the worker — as product of simple exchange it cannot be any other product — were not use value, subsistence, satisfaction of immediate needs, withdrawal from circulation of the equivalent put into it, in order to be destroyed by consumption — labour would confront capital not as labour, not as non-capital, but as capital. But capital, too, cannot confront capital, if it is not confronted by labour, for capital is capital only as non-labour, in this antithetical relation. Therefore the concept and relation of capital itself would be destroyed.
That there are conditions in which owners who themselves work exchange with one another is CERTAINLY not denied. But such conditions are not conditions of a society in which capital developed as such exists; they are everywhere destroyed, therefore, by its development. Capital can posit itself as capital only by positing labour as non-capital, as pure use value.
(As a slave, the labourer has exchange value, a value; as a free worker, he has no value; only the right to dispose over his labour, acquired by exchange with him, has value. He does not confront the capitalist as exchange value, but the capitalist confronts him as exchange value. His valuelessness and devaluation is the prerequisite of capital and the condition for free labour in general. Linguet considers it a retrogression"; he forgets that the worker is thereby formally posited as a person who is something for himself apart from his labour, and who alienates what expresses his life [Lebensäusserung] only as a means for his own life.[86] So long as the worker as such has exchange value, industrial capital as such cannot exist, therefore developed capital in general cannot exist. Labour must confront capital as pure use value, which is offered as a commodity by its owner himself in exchange for capital, in exchange for its exchange value [coin], which, of course, becomes real in the hands of the worker only in its determination as general means of exchange; otherwise disappears.) WELL.
The worker, then, is only in the relation of simple circulation, of simple exchange, and obtains only coin for his use value; subsistence; but mediated. This form of mediation is, as we have seen, essential for and characteristic of the relationship.(2) That he can proceed to the conversion of his coin into money — savings— only proves that his relationship is that of simple circulation; he can save more or less; but beyond that he cannot go. He can realise his savings only by temporarily enlarging the range of his enjoyments. It is important — and it affects the determination of the relationship itself — that, as money is the product of his exchange, general wealth drives him on as an illusion; makes him industrious. At the same time, this not only formally provides scope for arbitrariness for the realisation [11-29](3)...
[In this exchange, the worker indeed receives money only as coin, i.e. only in the vanishing form of subsistence for which he exchanges it. Subsistence, not wealth, the purpose of the exchange for him.
The capacity to work has been called the capital of the worker, in so far as it is the fund which he does not consume in an individual exchange, since he can constantly repeat the exchange for the duration of his life as a worker. According to this, everything would be capital which is a fund of repeated(4)]
[III-8][87] processes of the same subject; e.g. the substance of the eye is the capital of sight, etc. Such belletristic phrases, which by means of some sort of analogy relate everything to everything else, may even appear profound when are said for the first time, and the more so the more they identify the most disparate things. If repeated, and especially if repeated complacently, as statements of scientific value, they are tout bonnement* foolish. Suitable only for belletristic story-tellers and empty chatterboxes who besmear all sciences with their liquorice-sweet rubbish.
The fact that labour is always a new source of exchange for the worker so long as he is able to work — that is to say, not of any exchange but of exchange with capital — is inherent in the nature of the concept itself, namely that he sells only the temporary right to dispose over his labour capacity, hence can always begin the exchange anew as soon as he has absorbed the required amount of substances to be able to reproduce his life-activity. Instead of making this the object of their amazement — and telling the worker it is a great merit of capital he can live at all, that he can repeat certain life processes every day, as soon as he has slept and eaten sufficiently — these whitewashing sycophants of bourgeois political economy should rather have noted that after constantly repeated labour, the worker has only his living immediate labour to exchange. The repetition itself is IN FACT only apparent. What he exchanges with capital is his entire labour capacity which he spends in, SAY, 20 years. Instead of paying him for this at once, capital pays for it in instalments, as he puts it at the disposal of capital, say, in weekly instalments. This alters absolutely nothing in the nature of the matter and does not at all justify the conclusion that, because the worker must sleep for 10-12 hours before he is able to repeat his labour and his exchange with capital, labour constitutes his capital. What is IN FACT conceived of as capital here, is the limit on, the interruption of, his labour, the fact that he is not a perpetuum mobile. The struggle for the Ten Hours Bill,[88] etc., proves that the capitalist desires nothing more than that the worker should expend his dosages of life power as much as possible without interruption.
We come now to the second process, which constitutes the relation between labour and capital after this exchange. We want to add here only that the political economists themselves express the above statement thus: wages are not productive. Productive for them, OF COURSE, means productive of wealth. Now, since wages are the product of exchange between worker and capital — and the only product that is posited in this act itself — they admit that the worker produces no wealth in this exchange, either for the capitalist, for whom the payment of money for a use value — and this payment forms the only function of capital in this relationship — is the giving up of wealth, not its creation, which is why he tries to pay as little as possible; or for the worker, because it produces for him only means of subsistence, satisfaction of individual needs, more or less—never the general form of wealth, never wealth. Nor can it, for the content of the commodity which he sells does not in any way place it above the general laws of circulation, under which the value he throws into circulation obtains him, by means of coin, an equivalent in another use value, which he consumes. Such an operation can OF COURSE never enrich, but must at the end of the process bring the operator back exactly to the point at which he was at its beginning. This does not, as we have seen,[3] exclude but rather includes the possibility that the range of his immediate satisfactions may contract or expand to a certain extent. On the other hand, if the capitalist — who in this exchange is not even posited yet as capitalist but only as money—repeated this act again and again, his money would soon have been eaten up by the worker and he [III-9] would have squandered it in a series of Other satisfactions, patched trousers, polished boots,—in short, services received. In any case, the repetition of this operation would be measured exactly by the limit of his purse. It would not enrich him any more than the expenditure of money for other use values for his own beloved self, all of which, as is well known, do not bring in but cost money.
Seeing that in the relationship of labour and capital, and also in this first relationship of exchange between the two, the worker buys exchange value and the capitalist use value, in that labour confronts capital not as a use value but as use value pure and simple, it may seem peculiar that the capitalist should obtain wealth, and the worker only a use value which is extinguished in consumption. ^ I n so far as this concerns the capitalist, this is only to be developed in relation to the second process.^ This appears as a dialectic, which turns into the reverse of what would be expected. But looked at more closely, it becomes clear that the worker, who exchanges his commodity, goes through the form C—M—M—C in the process of exchange. If in circulation we start from the commodity, from use value as the principle of exchange, we necessarily arrive back at the commodity, in that money appears only as coin, and as means of exchange is only a vanishing mediator; but the commodity as such, after it has traversed its circuit, is consumed as a direct object of need. On the other hand, capital represents M—C—C—M; the antithetical moment.
The separation of property from labour appears as a necessary law of this exchange between capital and labour. Labour as non-capital, posited as such, is:
(1) Not objectified labour, negatively conceived (itself still objective; the not-objective itself in objective [objectiver](5) form). As such it is non-raw material, non-instrument of labour, non-raw product: labour separated from all means of labour and all objects of labour, from its whole objectivity [Objectivität]. Living labour existing as abstraction from these moments of its actual reality (likewise, non-value); this complete denudation, the purely subjective existence of labour lacking all objectivity [Objectivität]. Labour as absolute poverty: poverty, not as shortage, but as a complete exclusion of objective wealth. Or also as the existing non-value and hence purely objective use value, existing without mediation, this objectivity can only be one not separated from the person; only one coincident with his immediate corporality. Since the objectivity is purely immediate, it is also immediately non-objectivity. In other words: not an objectivity falling outside the immediate existence of the individual himself.
(2) Not-objectified labour, non-value, positively conceived; or negativity relating itself to itself. As such it is not- objectified, therefore non-objective, i.e. subjective existence of labour itself. Labour not as object but as activity; not as itself value, but as the living source of value. General wealth, in contrast to capital, in which wealth exists objectively, as reality — general wealth as its general possibility, which [possibility] proves itself as such in activity. It is therefore no contradiction at all that labour is on the one hand absolute poverty as object, and on the other the general possibility of wealth as subject and activity, or rather these mutually wholly contradictory statements condition each other and follow from the essence of labour, as it is presupposed by capital as its opposite, as the antithetical existence of capital, and as, on the other hand, it, in its turn, presupposes capital.
The last point, to which attention still has to be paid concerning the relationship of labour to capital, is this: as use value as such confronting money posited as capital, it is not this or that labour, but labour pure and simple, abstract labour; absolutely indifferent to its particular determinateness, but capable of assuming any determinateness. Labour must of course correspond to the particular substance of which a particular capital consists as a particular labour; but since capital as such is indifferent to every particularity of its substance, and is both the totality of all its particularities as well as the abstraction from all of them, labour confronting capital has subjectively this same totality and abstraction in itself. E.g. in guild and craft labour, where capital itself still has an undeveloped form, is still completely immersed in a specific substance, hence is not yet capital as such, labour, too, appears as still immersed in its particular specificity; [appears] not in the totality and abstraction of labour as such as it confronts capital. That is to say, though labour is in every individual case a specific kind of labour, capital can confront any specific labour; the totality of all labour confronts it ôvvà|xei(6) and it is fortuitous which particular one confronts it at any particular time.
On the other hand, the worker himself is absolutely indifferent to the specificity of his labour; it has as such no interest for him, but only in so far as it is, in general, labour and is as such use value for capital. [Ill-10] To be the bearer of labour as such, i.e. of labour as use value for capital, is therefore the sum total of his economic character; he is worker in contrast to the capitalist. This is not the character of the artisan, guild-member, etc., whose economic character lies precisely in the specificity of their labour and their relation to a specific master, etc.
This economic relation — the character which capitalist and worker bear as the extremes of a relation of production — is therefore developed the more purely and adequately, the more labour loses all craft-like character, the more its particular skill becomes something abstract, irrelevant, and the more it becomes purely abstract, purely mechanical activity, hence irrelevant, indifferent to its particular form; the more it becomes merely formal activity or, what is the same, merely physical [stoffliche] activity, activity pure and simple, indifferent to its form. Here we have another example of how the particular specificity of the relation of production, of the category — here capital and labour — becomes real only with the development of a particular material mode of production and a particular stage of development of the industrial productive forces. (This point in general to be particularly developed in the context of this relation later, as it is already posited here in the relation itself, while in the case of the abstract determinations, exchange value, circulation, money, it is still more relevant to our subjective reflection.)
(2) We come now to the second aspect of the process. The exchange between capital or capitalist and the worker is now complete, in so far as it is a question of the process of exchange at all. It now proceeds to the relation of capital to labour as its use value. Labour is not only the use value confronting capital, it is the use value of capital itself. As the non-being of values in so far as they are objectified, labour is their being in so far as they are not objectified, their ideal being; the possibility of values, and as activity the positing of value. Opposed to capital it is the mere abstract form, the mere possibility of value-positing activity which exists only as ability, capacity in the bodily existence of the worker. But brought into real activity by contact with capital — by itself it cannot enter upon such activity, since it is without object — it becomes a real value-positing, productive activity. With respect to capital, the activity can, in general, only consist in the reproduction of capital — the preservation and increase of it as real and effective value, not of only notional value, as in money as such. By the exchange with the worker, capital has appropriated labour itself, which has become one of the moments of capital, and which now acts as a fructifying vitality upon its merely present and hence dead objectivity.
Capital is money (exchange value posited for itself), but no longer money as in a particular substance and therefore excluded from the other substances of the exchange values existing alongside it, but obtaining its ideal determination in all substances, in exchange values representing every form and mode of existence of objectified labour. In so far as capital, as money existing in all particular forms of objectified labour, now enters the process with labour, not objectified labour but living labour, labour existing as process and action, it is initially in this qualitative difference of the substance in which it exists from the form, in which it now also exists as labour. It is in the process of this distinction and the transcendence of this distinction that capital itself becomes a process.
Labour is the yeast thrown into capital, bringing it now into fermentation. On the one hand, the objectivity in which capital exists must be processed, i.e. consumed by labour. On the other hand, the mere subjectivity of labour as pure form must be transcended, and it must be objectified in the material of capital. The relation of capital in accordance with its content to labour, of objectified labour to living labour — in this relation where capital appears as passive towards labour, it is its passive being, as a particular substance, that enters into relation with labour as creative activity — can in general only be the relation of labour to its objectivity, its physical matter—(which must be dealt with already in the first chapter which must precede that on exchange value and must treat of production in general) — and with regard to labour as activity the physical matter, the objectified labour, has only two relations: that of the raiv material, i.e. of the formless physical matter, of mere material for the form-giving, purposive activity of labour; and that of the instrument of labour, of the means, itself objective, by which the subjective activity inserts an object as its conductor between itself and the object.
The determination as product, which the economists bring in here, does not yet belong here at all, as a determination distinct from raw material and instrument of labour. It appears as result, not as premiss of the process between the passive content of capital and labour as activity. As premiss, the product is not a relation of the object to labour different from raw material and instrument of labour, because raw material and instrument of labour, as they are the substance of values, are themselves objectified labour, products. The substance of value is in general not the particular natural substance, but objectified labour. This itself, [III-ll] in turn, appears in relation to living labour as raw material and instrument of labour. Considering the simple act of production in itself, the instrument of labour and the raw material may appear as already existing in nature, so that they only need to be appropriated, i.e. made into object and means of labour, which is not itself a process of labour. In relation to them, therefore, the product appears as something qualitatively different, and is a product not only as the result of labour applied by means of the instrument to the physical matter, but as the first objectification of labour alongside them. But as component parts of capital, raw material and instrument of labour are themselves already objectified labour, that is product.
This still does not exhaust the relationship. For, e.g. in production in which no exchange value at all exists, no capital therefore exists, the product of labour can become the means and object of new labour. For example, in agriculture producing purely for use value. The bow of the hunter, the net of the fisherman, in short the simplest conditions already presuppose the product which ceases to count as product and becomes raw material, or in particular instrument of production, for this is really the first specific form in which the product appears as means of reproduction. This relation therefore by no means exhausts the relationship in which raw material and instrument of labour make their appearance as moments of capital itself.
The economists, incidentally, bring in the product as the third element of the substance of capital in quite a different connection as well. It is the product, in so far as it is destined to step outside both the process of production and circulation, and to be immediate object of individual consumption, approvisionnement, as Cherbuliez calls it.(7) That is to say, the products which are presupposed so that the worker lives as worker and is capable of living during production, before a new product is produced. That the capitalist possesses this capacity is posited in that each element of capital is money and as such can be transformed from itself as the general form of wealth into the physical matter of wealth, objects of consumption. The approvisionnement of the economists, therefore, applies only to the workers; i.e. it is the money expressed in the form of consumable objects, use value, which they receive from the capitalist in the act of exchange between the two [parties]. But this belongs in the first act [of the exchange]. How far this first act is related to the second, is not yet at issue here. The only diremption posited by the process of production itself is the original diremption, that posited by the distinction between objectified labour and living labour itself, i.e. that between raw material and instrument of labour. That the economists confuse these determinations is quite in order, since they must confuse the two moments of the relation between capital and labour and dare not fix the specific difference between them.
Thus: the raw material is consumed by being changed, formed by labour, and the instrument of labour is consumed by being used up in this process, worn out. On the other hand, labour is likewise consumed by being employed, set in motion and so a definite quantity of the muscular strength, etc., of the worker is spent, whereby he exhausts himself. But it is not merely consumed; at the same time, it is converted from the form of activity and fixed, materialised, into that of object, of rest; as change of object, it changes its own form and from activity becomes being. The end of the process is the product, in which the raw material appears as combined with labour, and in which the instrument of labour has likewise translated itself from mere possibility into reality, in that it has become the real conductor of labour, but thereby it has been consumed in its static form through its mechanical or chemical relation to the material of labour.
All three moments of the process: material, instrument, labour, coincide in a neutral result: the product. In the product are at once reproduced the moments of the process of production which were consumed in it. The whole process therefore appears as productive consumption, i.e. as consumption which neither ends in nothing nor in the mere subjectification of the objective, but which, in turn, is itself posited as an object. The consumption is not a simple consumption of the physical matter, but consumption of consumption itself; in the transcendence of the physical matter, it is the transcendence of this transcendence, and hence the positing of the physical matter. The form-giving activity consumes the object and consumes itself, but it consumes the given form of the object only in order to posit it in a new objective form, and it consumes itself only in its subjective form as activity. It consumes the objectivity [das Gegenständliche] of the object — the indifference to form— and the subjectivity [das Subjektive] of the activity; forms the one, materialises the other. As product, however, the result of the process of production is use value.
[Ill-12] If we now consider the result so far obtained, we find: Firstly: By the appropriation, incorporation of labour into capital — money, i.e. the act of purchase of the right to dispose over the worker, appears here only as a means of bringing about this process, not as a moment of the process itself — capital begins to ferment and becomes a process, the process of production, in which it, as totality, as living labour, relates to itself not only as objectified, but — because objectified — as mere object of labour.
Secondly: In simple circulation, the substance of the commodity and of money was itself of no consequence for their formal character, i.e. in so far as commodity and money remained moments of circulation. The commodity, so far as its substance was concerned, fell outside the economic relationship as object of consumption (of need). Money, in so far as its form made itself independent, still related itself to circulation, but only negatively, and was only this negative relation. Fixed for itself, it was likewise extinguished in dead materiality, ceased to be money. Commodity and money were both expressions of exchange value and different only as general and particular exchange value. This difference itself was, in turn, only a notional one, in that both in real circulation the two determinations were exchanged, and each considered for itself changed its determination: money itself was a particular commodity and the commodity as price was itself general money. The difference was only formal. Each was posited in the one determination only because, and in so far as, it was not posited in the other. Now, however, in the process of production, capital distinguishes itself as a form from itself as a substance. It is both aspects at once, and at the same time the relation of the two to one another. But:
Thirdly: It appeared as this relation still only in itself. The relation is not yet posited, or is initially posited only in the character of one of the two moments, that of the physical matter, which is in itself different as material (raw material and instrument) and form (labour), and as the relation of both, as real process, is itself again only a relation of physical matter — relation of the two physical elements which make up the content of capital distinct from its formal relation as capital.
If we consider capital from the aspect in which it originally appears distinct from labour, it is in the process only passive being, only objective being, in which the formal character which makes it capital — i.e. a social relationship existing for itself[89]—is completely extinguished. It enters the process only as content — as objectified labour in general; but the fact that it is objectified labour is completely indifferent to labour, and it is the relation of labour to capital which constitutes the process. Indeed, it is only as object, not as objectified labour, that it enters the process, that it is worked on. Cotton which becomes yarn, or yarn which is woven into cloth, or the cloth which becomes material for printing and dyeing, exist for labour only as already available cotton, yarn, cloth. In so far as they themselves are products of labour, are objectified labour, they do not enter into any process at all; they do so only as material existences with particular natural properties. How these have been posited in them does not concern the relation of living labour to them; for living labour they exist only in so far as they exist in distinction from it, i.e. as material for labour.
This, in so far as the point of departure is capital in its objective form as a prerequisite for labour. On the other hand, in so far as labour itself has become one of capital's objective elements through the exchange with the worker, its distinction from the objective elements of capital is itself only an objective one; the objective elements are in the form of rest, labour is in the form of activity. The relation is the physical one of one of its elements to the other; but not its own relation to both.
Capital appears therefore on the one hand only as passive object, in which all relation of form has been extinguished; it appears on the other hand only as simple process of production, in which capital as such, as distinct from its substance, does not enter. It does not even appear in the substance appropriate to it — as objectified labour, for this is the substance of exchange value — but only in the natural form of being of this substance, in which all relation to exchange value, objectified labour, to labour itself as use value of capital — and therefore all relation to capital itself — has been extinguished.
Looked at from this side, [III-13] the process of capital coincides with the simple process of production as such, in which its character as capital is quitç as extinguished in the form of the process, as money was extinguished as money in the form of value. So far as we have considered this process up to this point, capital existing for itself, i.e. the capitalist, does not enter at all. It is not the capitalist who is consumed by labour as raw material and instrument of labour. Nor is it the capitalist who consumes, but labour. The process of production of capital thus does not appear as the process of production of capital but as the process of production pure and simple, and, in distinction from labour, capital appears only in its physical determination of raw material and instrument of labour. It is this aspect — which is not merely an arbitrary abstraction but an abstraction vanishing in the process itself — which the economists seize upon in order to represent capital as a necessary element of every process of production. Of course, they only do this by forgetting to pay attention to its behaviour as capital during this process.
Here is the place to draw attention to a moment which here, for the first time, arises not only from the standpoint of observation but is posited in the economic relationship itself. In the first act, in the exchange between capital and labour, labour as such, existing for itself, necessarily appeared as the worker. Similarly here in the second process: capital in general is posited as value existing for itself, as egotistic value, so to speak (something which was only aspired to in money). But capital existing for itself is the capitalist. Of course, socialists say: we need capital, but not the capitalist.[90]
Capital then appears as a pure thing, not as relationship of production, which, reflected in itself, is precisely the capitalist. I can indeed separate capital from this individual capitalist and it can pass on to another one. But when the former loses his capital, he loses the quality of being a capitalist. Capital is therefore quite separable from an individual capitalist, but not from the capitalist who as such confronts the worker. In the same way the individual worker can cease to be the being-for-itself of labour; he can inherit money, steal, etc. But then he ceases to be a worker. As worker he is only labour existing for itself. (This to be further developed later.)
[ Labour Process and Process of Valorisation]
Nothing can emerge at the end of the process which did not appear at its beginning as its premiss and condition. On the other hand, however, all this must indeed emerge. If, therefore, at the end of the process of production which began with capital as its premiss, capital seems to have finally disappeared as a formal relation, this can only be the case because the invisible threads which it draws through the process, have been overlooked. Let us therefore consider this aspect.
The first result, then, is: a) By the incorporation of labour into capital, capital becomes process of production; but initially material process of production; process of production in general, so that the process of production of capital is not distinct from the material process of production in general. Its determinateness of form is completely extinguished. Since capital has exchanged a part of its objective being for labour, that objective being itself is internally divided into object and labour; the relation of the two constitutes the process of production, or more precisely the labour process. Thus the labour process, posited as point of departure before value,—a process which because of its abstractness, its pure materiality, is equally common to all forms of production — here reappears again within capital, as a process which proceeds within its physical matter, forms its content.
(It will become evident that also within the process of production itself, this extinction of the determinateness of form is only a semblance.)
In so far as capital is value, but as a process initially appears under the form of the simple process of production, the process of production not posited in any particular economic determinateness, but the process of production in general, it can be said — depending on which particular aspect of the simple process of production (which as such, as we have seen, does not presuppose capital at all but is common to all modes of production) is fixed on — that capital becomes product, or that it is instrument of labour, or also the raw material of labour. Further, if it is conceived as one of those aspects which confronts labour as physical matter or mere means, then it is correct to say that capital is not productive[91] because it is then considered merely as the object, the material confronting labour; as merely passive. What is correct, however, is that it does not appear as one of these aspects, nor as the distinction of one aspect in itself, nor as mere result (product), but as the simple process of production itself; that this process now appears as the self-moving content of capital.
[111-14] ß) Now to consider the aspect of formal determinateness, as it preserves and modifies itself in the process of production.
^ W h a t is productive labour or what is not, a point about which there has been much contention since Adam Smith made this distinction,(1) must emerge from the dissection of the different aspects of capital itself. Productive labour is only that which produces capital. Is it not crazy, asks e.g. (at least something like that) Mr. Senior, that the piano-maker should be a productive worker but not the piano-player, although surely the piano would be a NONSENSE without the piano-player(2)? But this is exactly the case. The piano-maker reproduces capital; the pianist only exchanges his labour for revenue.[92] But doesn't the pianist produce music and satisfy our musical ear; doesn't he also produce the latter to a certain degree? IN FACT, he does so; his labour produces something; but it is not thereby productive labour in the economic sense; as little productive as is the labour of the madman who produces delusions. Labour is productive only when it produces its own opposite. Other economists therefore allow the so-called unproductive worker to be indirectly productive. For example, the pianist stimulates production; partly because he gives a more positive, vital tuning to our individuality, or also in the ordinary sense that he awakens a new need for whose satisfaction more industry is applied in immediate material production. But this already implies the admission that only labour which produces capital is productive; that therefore labour which does not do that, however useful it may be — it may just as well be harmful — is not productive for capitalisation, HENCE is unproductive labour.
Other economists say that the distinction between productive and unproductive labour should be related not to production but to consumption. QUITE THE CONTRARY. The tobacco-producer is productive, although the consumption of tobacco is unproductive.
Production for unproductive consumption is QUITE AS PRODUCTIVE AS
THAT FOR PRODUCTIVE CONSUMPTION; ALWAYS SUPPOSED THAT IT PRODUCES OR REPRO-
DUCES CAPITAL.
"PRODUCTIVE LABOURER HE THAT DIRECTLY AUGMENTS HIS MASTER'S WEALTH," says Malthus therefore quite correctly ([Principles of Political Economy, 2nd ed., London, 1836, p. 47] IX,(3) 40).[65]
Correct at least in one aspect. The expression is too abstract, since, formulated like this, it is equally true of the slave. The MASTERS WEALTH in relation to the worker is the form of wealth itself in its relation to labour, i.e. capital. PRODUCTIVE LABOURER HE THAT
DIRECTLY AUGMENTS C A P I T A L . ^
As use value labour exists only for capital, and it is the use value of capital itself, i.e. the mediating activity by which capital valorises itself. Capital reproducing and increasing its value is independent exchange value (money) as process, as process of valorisation. Labour does not therefore exist as use value for the worker; it does not exist for him, therefore, as power productive of wealth, as means or as activity of enrichment. He brings it as use value into the exchange with capital, which thus confronts him not as capital but as money. It is only capital as capital in relation to the worker through the consumption of labour, which initially falls outside this exchange and is independent of it. Whereas it is use value for capital, labour is mere exchange value for the worker; available exchange value. As such it is posited in the act of exchange with capital, by means of its sale for money.
The use value of a thing does not concern its seller as such, only its buyer. The property of saltpetre — that it can be used to make gun-powder — does not determine the price of saltpetre. This price is determined by the production costs of the saltpetre itself, the quantity of labour objectified in it. In circulation, into which use values enter as prices, their value does nor result from circulation, although it is realised only in circulation; it is presupposed to it, and is realised only by means of exchange for money.
Similarly, the labour which is sold by the worker as use value to capital, is for the worker his exchange value which he wants to realise, but which has already been determined before this act of exchange, is presupposed as condition for it, determined like the value of every other commodity by demand and supply or, in general — and we are concerned here only with the general level — by the costs of production, the quantity of objectified labour, by which the worker's labour capacity has been produced and which it therefore receives as equivalent. The [III-15] exchange value of labour, whose realisation takes place in the process of exchange with the capitalist, is therefore presupposed, predetermined, and merely undergoes the formal modification which every price posited only notionally receives through its realisation. It is not determined by the use value of labour. For the worker himself, labour has use value only in so far as it i s exchange value, not in so far as it produces exchange values. For capital, it has exchange value only in so far as it is use value. It is use value as distinct from its exchange value not for the worker himself, but only for capital. The worker therefore exchanges labour as a simple exchange value which has been predetermined, determined by a previous process. He exchanges labour itself as objectified labour, i.e. only in so far as it already objectifies a definite quantity of labour and hence its equivalent is already measured, given. Capital obtains it through exchange as living labour, as the general power productive of wealth; as wealth-augmenting activity. It is clear, therefore, that the worker cannot enrich himself through this exchange, since, in exchange for his labour capacity as a given magnitude, he surrenders its creative power, like Esau who gave up his birthright for a mess of pottage/[1] Rather, he necessarily impoverishes himself, as we shall see later on, in that the creative power of his labour establishes itself as the power of capital, and confronts him as an alien power. He divests himself of labour as power productive of wealth; capital appropriates it as such. The separation of labour and property in the product of labour, the separation of labour and wealth, is therefore posited in this very act of exchange. What appears as paradoxical result, is already contained in the premiss itself. The economists have expressed this more or less empirically.
Thus the productivity of his labour, his labour altogether, in so far as it is not a capacity but movement, real labour, becomes an alien power relative to the worker. Capital, on the contrary, valorises itself through the appropriation of alien labour. (At least valorisation is thereby made possible; as a result of the exchange between labour and capital. The relationship is realised only in the act of production itself, where capital actually consumes alien labour.)
Just as labour as presupposed exchange value is exchanged by the worker for an equivalent in money, this is, in turn, exchanged for an equivalent in commodities which are consumed. In this process of exchange, labour is not productive; it only becomes so for capital; it can withdraw from circulation only what it has thrown into it, a predetermined quantity of commodities which is no more its own product than it is its own value.
The workers, says Sismondi, exchange their labour for grain and consume it, while their labour "has become capital for their master" (Sismondi, [Nouveaux principes d'économie politique, Vol. I, p. 90,] VI).
"Giving their labour in exchange, the workers convert it into capital" (idem, [p. 105,] VIII).
By selling his labour to the capitalist, the worker receives a right only to the price of labour, not to the product of this labour nor to the value he has added to it (Cherbuliez, [Richesse ou pauvreté, pp. 55-50,] XXVIII).
"Sale of labour = renunciation of all the fruits of labour" (I.e. [p. 64]).
All advances of civilisation, therefore, or in other words all expansion of the social productive forces, or, IF YOU WANT, of the productive forces of labour itself—as they result from science, inventions, division and combination of labour, improved means of communication, creation of the world market, machinery, etc.—do not enrich the worker but capital; hence they only further enlarge the power dominating over labour; enlarge only the productive power of capital. Since capital is the antithesis of the worker, they augment only the objective power standing over labour.
The transformation of labour (as living, purposive activity) into capital is, in itself, the result of the exchange between capital and labour, in so far as that transformation gives the capitalist the right of ownership over the product of labour (and command over labour). This transformation is posited only in the process of production itself. The question whether or not capital is productive is therefore absurd. Labour itself is productive only as absorbed into capital, only where capital constitutes the basis of production and the capitalist is therefore the commander of production. The productivity of labour becomes the productive power of capital in the same way as the general exchange value of commodities fixes itself in money. Labour, as it exists in contrast to capital, for itself, in the worker, labour therefore in its immediate being, separated from capital, is not productive. As activity of the worker, moreover, it never becomes productive, because it enters only into the simple process of circulation, which effects only formal transformations. Those writers, therefore, who demonstrate that all [IIT-16] the productive power ascribed to capital is a misplacement, a transposi-
Hon of the productive power of labour, forget precisely that capital is itself essentially this misplacement, this transposition, and that wage labour as such presupposes capital, which is, therefore, this TRANSUBSTANTIATION also from the viewpoint of wage labour; the necessary process for wage labour to posit its own powers as alien to the worker. T o leave wage labour and at the same time to abolish capital is therefore a self-contradictory and self-negating demand.
Others, even economists, e.g. Ricardo, Sismondi, etc., say that only labour, not capital, is productive. [3] But then they do not conceive capital in its specific determinateness of form, as a relation of production, reflected in itself, and think only of its physical substance, raw material, etc. But these physical elements do not make capital into capital. O n the other hand, it then again occurs to them that capital is in one respect value, i.e. something immaterial, indifferent to its physical consistency. Thus Say:
"Capital is always immaterial by nature, since it is not matter which makes capital, but the value of that matter, value which has nothing corporeal about it" (Say, [Traité d'économie politique, 3rd ed., Vol. II, p. 429,] 21).
Or Sismondi:
"Capital is a commercial idea" (J. C. L. Simonde de Sismondi, [Etudes sur l'économie politique, Vol. II, p. 273,] LX).b
But then again it occurs to them that capital is also another economic determination than value, for otherwise it would not be possible at all to speak of capital in distinction from value, and, that even if all capitals are values, values as such are not capital. Then they take refuge again in its physical form within the process of production, e.g. when Ricardo explains capital as ACCUMULATED LABOUR EMPLOYED IN THE PRODUCTION OF NEW LABOUR, i.e. as mere instrument of labour or material for labour.c In this sense, Say even speaks of the productive service of capital,d upon which its remuneration is supposed to be based, as if the instrument of labour as such had a claim upon the gratitude of the worker, and as if it were not
a D. Ricardo, On the Principles of Political Economy, and Taxation, pp. 334-37; J. C. L. Simonde de Sismondi, Etudes sur l'économie politique, Brussels, 1837-38, Vol. I, p. 22 and Vol. II, p. 273.— Ed.
b The quotations from Say and Sismondi are in French in the manuscript.— Ed. c D. Ricardo, On the Principles of Political Economy, and Taxation, pp. 327 and 499.— Ed.
d J. B. Say, Traité d'économie politique, 3rd ed., Vol. II, pp. 425 and 429. Marx quotes in French.— Ed.
precisely and only through him that it can function as instrument of labour and become productive. The independence of the instrument of labour, i.e. a social determination of the instrument of labour, i.e. its determination as capital, is thus presupposed in order to deduce the claims of capital. Proudhon's phrase "capital is value, labour produces"(4) means absolutely nothing but: capital is value, and as nothing is said about capital here other than that it is value, value is value (the subject of the judgement is here simply another name for the predicate); and labour produces, is productive activity, means labour is labour, since it is nothing apart from the "produces".
That these identical judgements do not contain any great fund of wisdom must be obvious; and especially that they cannot express a relationship such as that between value and labour in which they themselves relate to one another and distinguish themselves from each other, and do not just lie side by side in mutual indifference. Already the fact that it is labour which appears confronting capital as subject, i.e. the worker only in the determination of labour, and this is not he himself, should open one's eyes. This already implies, quite apart from capital, a relationship of the worker to his own activity which is in no way the "natural" relationship, but itself already contains a specific economic determination.
Capital, so far as we consider it here, as a relationship of value and money, which must be distinguished, is capital in general, i.e. the quintessence of the characteristics which distinguish value as capital from value as simple value or money. Value, money, circulation, etc., prices, etc., are all presupposed, as well as labour, etc. But we are concerned neither as yet with a particular form of capital, nor with one individual capital as distinct from other individual capitals, etc. We are present at the process of its becoming. This dialectical process of becoming is only the ideal expression of the real movement through which capital comes into being. The later relations are to be considered as a development coming out of this germ. But it is necessary to fix the specific form in which capital exists at a certain point. Otherwise, confusion results.
[111-17] Capital has so far been considered under the aspect of its physical matter as simple process of production. But this process is, under the aspect of its formal determination, a process of self-valorisation. Self-valorisation includes both the preservation of the original value and its multiplication.
Value enters as subject. Labour is purposive activity, and so, as far as the physical aspect is concerned, it is presupposed that in the process of production the instrument of labour has really been used as a means to an end, and that the raw material has obtained a higher use value as product than it had before, whether as a result of a chemical change of matter or of a mechanical transformation. But this side of the process, as it concerns only use value, still belongs to the simple process of production. It is not the issue here — this is indeed included, presupposed — that a higher use value has been produced (this is itself very relative; if corn is transformed into brandy, the higher use value itself is already posited with respect to circulation). Also no higher use value is produced for the individual, for the producer. At least this is fortuitous and does not concern the relationship as such. But a higher use value is produced for others. The point is that a higher exchange value has resulted.
In simple circulation, the process ended for the individual commodity when it reached its destination as use value and was consumed. It thereby went out of circulation, lost its exchange value, and its economic determination in general. Capital has consumed its material by means of labour and labour by means of its material; it has consumed itself as use value, but only as use value for it itself as capital. Its consumption as use value itself, therefore, here falls within circulation, or rather it itself posits the beginning of circulation, or its end, whichever one wishes. The consumption itself of use value falls here within the economic process, because the use value itself is here determined by exchange value. At no moment of the process of production does capital cease to be capital or value to be value, and as such exchange value. Nothing is more stupid than to say, as Mr. Proudhon does,(5) that capital changes from product into exchange value by the act of exchange, i.e. by the fact that it re-enters simple circulation. We would thereby have been flung right back to the beginning, even to direct barter, where the genesis of exchange value from the product is observed.
That capital can and does re-enter circulation as commodity after the conclusion of the process of production, after its consumption as use value, is already implied in the fact that it was presupposed as self-preserving exchange value. But in so far as it now becomes commodity again only as product, and as commodity becomes exchange value, gets a price and as such is realised in money, it is a simple commodity, exchange value in general. As such it is in circulation exposed to the even chance that it may or may not be realised in money, i.e. that its exchange value may or may not become money. It is therefore much truer to say that its exchange value has become problematical — previously it was notionally posited — than that it has come into existence. And what is more, the fact that it is really posited as a higher exchange value in circulation cannot have arisen from circulation itself, in which in its simple determination only equivalents are exchanged. If it comes out of circulation as a higher exchange value, it must have entered it as such.
Capital as a form consists not of objects of labour and labour, but of values and still more definitely of prices. That its value elements have assumed different substances during the process of production, does not concern their determination as values; they are not thereby changed. If out of the form of unrest — of the process — they again condense themselves at the end of the process into resting, objective form in the product, this is likewise a mere change of physical matter in relation to value which does not affect it. True, the substances as such have been destroyed, but they have not been made into nothing but into a differently formed substance. Earlier, they appeared as elementary, indifferent conditions of the product. Now they are the product. The value of the product can therefore only=the sum of values which were materialised in the particular physical elements of the process, as raw material, instrument of labour (to this category belong also the purely instrumental commodities) and as labour itself. The raw material has been entirely consumed, so has the labour; the instrument only partly so; it therefore continues to possess part of the value of the capital in its particular mode of existence before the process began. This part therefore does not enter at all into consideration here, since it suffered no alteration. The different modes of existence of value were mere semblance, value itself constituted the essence which remained identical to itself in their disappearance. The product considered as value is from this aspect not a product, but rather identical, unchanged value, only existing in a different mode, which is, however, also irrelevant to it and can be exchanged for money.
The value of the product=the value of the raw material+the value of the destroyed part of the instrument of labour (i.e. the part which has been transferred to the product and transcended in its original form) + the value of the labour. Or the price of the product is equal to its costs of production, i.e.=the sum of the prices of the commodities which have been consumed in the process of production. In other words, this means nothing more than that with respect to its physical matter the process of production was of no consequence for value; [111-18] that it has therefore remained identical with itself and has only adopted another physical mode of existence, has been materialised in another substance and form. (The form of the substance does not concern the economic form, i.e. value as such.)
If the capital was originally = to 100 thaler, then afterwards, as before, it is 100 thaler, although the 100 thaler existed in the process of production as 50 thaler of raw cotton, 40 thaler of wages+10 thaler of the spinning machine; and now exists as spun cotton yarn to the price of 100 thaler. This reproduction of the 100 thaler is a simple retention of self-identity, it is only mediated by the material process of production. This must therefore proceed to the product or else the cotton loses its value, the instrument of labour has been consumed in vain and wages paid to labour in vain. The only condition for the self-preservation of value is that the process of production is really a total process, i.e. proceeds to the product. The totality of the process of production, i.e. that it proceeds to the product, is here in fact the condition for the self-preservation, retention of self-identity of value; but this is already implied in the first condition, that capital really becomes use value, real process of production; it is therefore at this point presupposed.
On the other hand, the process of production is a process of production for capital only in so far as it preserves itself as value in this process, i.e. in the product. The statement that the necessary price=the sum of the prices of the costs of production, is therefore purely analytical.[93] It is the premiss of the production of capital itself. First, the capital is posited as 100 thaler, as simple value; then it is posited in this process as the sum of the prices of specific value elements of itself, determined by the very process of production. The price of capital, its value expressed in money=the price of its product. That is, the value of capital as result of the process of production is the same as it was as the premiss of the process.
During the process, however, it does not subsist in the simplicity it had at the beginning, or the one which it takes on again at the end as result, but divides itself into what are initially completely indifferent quantitative components, namely value of labour (wages), value of instrument of labour and value of raw material. As yet, no other relation is posited than that in the process of production simple value divides itself numerically as several values which fuse again in the product in their simplicity, but which exist now as a sum. But the sum = the original unity. With respect to value, there is apart from the quantitative division absolutely no distinction in the relation between the different value quantities. 100 thaler was the original capital, 100 thaler is the product, but the 100 thaler now as the sum of 50+40+10 thaler. I could also have taken the 100 thaler originally as a sum of 50+40+10 thaler, but just as well as a sum of 60 + 30+10 thaler, etc. That it now appears as a sum of specific numbers of units is posited by the fact that each of the different physical elements into which the capital divided itself in the process of production represented a part, but a specific part, of its value.
It will become clear later that these numbers into which the original unity is divided, themselves have certain relations to one another, but that does not concern us here yet. In so far as a movement is posited in value itself during the process of production, it is a purely formal movement consisting in the following simple act: that value first exists as a unity, a definite number of units, which is itself regarded as a unity, as a whole: capital of 100 thaler; second, that during the process of production this unity is divided into 50 thaler, 40 thaler, and 10 thaler, a division which is essential in so far as material of labour, instrument and labour are required in specific quantities, but here, in relation to the 100 thaler themselves, this division is merely an indifferent breaking down into different amounts of the same unit; finally, that the 100 thaler reappear in the product as sum. The only process in relation to value, that at one time it appears as a whole, a unity; then as division of this unity into specific amounts; finally as sum. The 100 thaler which appear at the end as sum are equally and precisely the sum which appeared at the beginning as a unity. The determination of the sum, of the adding together, came about only through the division occurring in the act of production; but does not exist in the product as such. The statement thus says nothing more than that the price of the product=the price of the production costs, or that the value of the capital = the value of the product, i.e. that the value of the capital has preserved itself in the act of production and now appears as sum.
With this simple identity of capital or reproduction of its value through and throughout the process of production, we would not yet have got any farther than we were at the beginning. What was there at the beginning as premiss is now [II1-19] there as result and indeed in unaltered form. It is clear that this is not what the economists in fact mean when they speak of the determination of price by the production costs. Otherwise, a value greater than was originally present could never be created; no greater exchange value, although a greater use value, which is not the point at all here. The point is the use value of capital as such, not of the use value of a commodity.
If one says that the production costs or the necessary price of a commodity is=to 110, the calculation is as follows: original capital=100 (thus e.g. raw material = 50; labour=40; instrument=10) + 5% interest + 5% profit. Therefore the production costs=110, not=100; the production costs [Produktionskos-ten] 29 are therefore greater than the costs of production [Kosten der Produktion].
It is of absolutely no avail to flee from the exchange value of commodities to their use value, as some economists like to do. Whether this use value is higher or lower does not as such determine exchange value. Commodities often fall below their price of production,[94] though they doubtless have obtained a higher use value than they had in the period before production.
It is just as useless to take refuge in circulation. I produce for 100 but sell for 110.
"PROFIT IS NOT MADE BY EXCHANGING. HAD IT NOT EXISTED BEFORE, NEITHER COULD IT AFTER THAT TRANSACTION" (Ramsay, [An Essay on the Distribution of Wealth, Edinburgh, 1836, p. 184] IX, 88).
That amounts to trying to explain from simple circulation the augmentation of value, whereas, on the contrary, circulation expressly posits value only as an equivalent. It is also clear empirically that if everyone sells 10% too dear, this is the same if they all sold for the production costs. Surplus value[93] would thereby be purely nominal, fictitious, conventional, a mere phrase. And since money is itself a commodity, a product, it would also be sold 10% too dear, i.e. the seller who received 110 thaler would IN FACT receive only 100.
(See Ricardo on foreign trade which he conceives of as simple circulation and therefore says:
"Foreign trade can never increase the exchange values of a country" (Ricardo, [On the Principles of Political Economy, and Taxation, p. 131,] 39, 40[96]).
The reasons he advances for this are absolutely the same as those which "prove" that exchange as such, simple circulation, that is trade in general, so far as it is conceived of as circulation, can never raise exchange values, can never produce exchange value.)
The statement that price=production costs, would otherwise have to be read as: the price of a commodity is always greater than its production costs.
Apart from the simple numerical division and adding together, the process of production also adds the formal element to value, namely that its elements now appear as production costs, i.e. precisely that the elements of the process of production itself are not preserved in their physical qualities but rather as values, which are consumed in the form of being they had prior to the process of production.
On the other hand, it is clear that, if the act of production is only the reproduction of the value of capital, only a change of physical matter, not an economic one, would have occurred in it, and that such a mere preservation of its value contradicts its concept. True, it would remain outside circulation, like autonomous money, it would adopt the form of various commodities, but to no purpose. This would be a pointless process, since it would ultimately represent only the identical sum of money, and would merely have run the risk of being damaged in the act of production, which can miscarry, and in which money gives up its imperishable form.
WELL. The process of production is now at en end. The product has also been realised in money again, and has adopted once more the original form of the 100 thaler. But the capitalist must also eat and drink; he cannot live on this change in the form of money. A part of the 100 thaler would therefore have to be exchanged not as capital, but as coin for commodities as use values and consumed in this form. The 100 thaler would have become 90, and since he always ultimately reproduces capital in the form of money, more precisely, in the form of the quantity of money with which he began production, in the end the 100 thaler would be eaten up and the capital would have gone. But the capitalist is paid for the labour of throwing the 100 thaler as capital into the process of production instead of consuming them. But with what is he to be paid? And does not his labour appear absolutely useless, since capital includes wages, which means that the workers could live by the simple reproduction of the production costs, which the capitalist cannot do? He would therefore appear among the faux frais de production? But whatever the service he renders may be — reproduction would be possible without him, since the workers in the process of production demand only the value they bring into it, therefore do not need the whole relation of capital in order to begin the process of production always anew. Secondly, there would be no fund from which the capitalist's service could be paid for, since the price of the commodity=the production costs. But if his labour were conceived of as a special labour, alongside and apart from that of the workers, perhaps as the labour of SUPERINTENDENCE, etc., then he would receive like them a definite wage, therefore he would fall into their category, and his relationship to labour would not at all be that of a capitalist; neither would he ever enrich himself, he would only receive an exchange value which he would have to consume through circulation.
The existence of capital as against labour requires that capital in its being-for-itself, the capitalist as not-worker, should be able to exist and live. On the other hand, it is equally clear that capital, even from the standpoint of [111-20] its ordinary economic characteristics, if it could only preserve its value would not in fact do so. The risks of production must be compensated for. Capital must preserve itself in the fluctuations of prices. The depreciation of capital which goes on constantly through rising productivity must be compensated for, etc. Therefore the economists flatly assert that if no proceeds, no profit, resulted from the process of production, every capitalist would consume his money instead of throwing it into production and employing it as capital. In short, if this non-valorisation, i.e. non-multiplication of the value of capital is presupposed, it is presupposed that capital is not a real element of production, not a particular relation of production; a. condition is presupposed in which the production costs do not have the form of capital, and capital is not posited as a condition of production.
It is easy to understand how labour can augment use value; the difficulty lies in understanding how it can create higher exchange values than those with which it began.
Suppose the exchange value which capital pays to the worker were an exact equivalent for the value which labour produces in the process of production. In this case, an increase in the exchange value of the product would be impossible. What labour as such would have brought into the process of production over and above the original value of the raw material and instrument of labour would be paid to the worker. The value of the product itself, in so far as it is a surplus over and above the value of the raw material and instrument, would go to the worker; only the capitalist pays this value to the worker in wages and the worker gives it back to the capitalist in the product.
^ The fact that the term production costs does not mean the sum of values entering production — even by the economists who assert that it does — is clearly illustrated by interest on borrowed capital. For the industrial capitalist this belongs directly to his outgoings, to his real production costs. But the very existence of interest already implies that capital emerges from production as surplus value, since interest is itself only one form of this surplus value. Therefore, since interest constitutes for the borrower already a part of his direct production costs, it is apparent that capital as such enters into the production costs, but capital as such is not a mere addition of its value components.
In interest, capital itself reappears in the character of a commodity, but as a commodity specifically distinct from all other commodities; capital as such—not as a simple sum of exchange values — enters into circulation and becomes commodity. Here the character of the commodity itself is present as economic, specific determination, not indifferent as in simple circulation, nor directly related to labour as its [capital's] opposite, as its use value, as in industrial capital; that is, in capital as it is in its more immediate determinations resulting from production and circulation. The commodity as capital or capital as commodity is not, therefore, exchanged in circulation for an equivalent. By entering into circulation, it maintains its being-for-itself; it therefore maintains its original relation to its owner even when it passes into the possession of another. It is therefore merely loaned. Its use value as such for its owner is its valorisation, money as money, not as means of circulation; its use value as capital.
The demand put forward by Mr. Proudhon that capital should not be loaned and bear interest, but should be sold as a commodity for its equivalent, like every other commodity,[3] is nothing but the demand that exchange value should never become capital but remain mere exchange value, i.e. that capital should not exist as capital.[97] This demand, together with the other one, namely that wage labour should remain the general basis of production, displays a delightful confusion about the simplest economic concepts. Hence the miserable role which he played in the polemic with Bastiat, about which later.(6) His chatter about considerations of fairness and justice only amounts to this: he wants to apply the property or legal relationships corresponding to simple exchange, as a standard for the property and legal relationships of a higher stage of exchange value. Therefore Bastiat himself, unconsciously, re-emphasises the moments in simple circulation which tend to give rise to capital.
Capital itself as commodity is money as capital or capital as money.^
/ The third moment to be developed in the formation of the concept of capital, is primitive accumulation as against labour, therefore also objectless labour as against accumulation.
The first moment took its point of departure from value, as emerging from circulation and presupposing it. It was the simple concept of capital: money on the direct path to becoming capital. The second moment proceeded from capital as the premiss of production and the result of it. The third moment posits capital as a specific unity of circulation and production.
It must be distinguished from the accumulation [111-21] of capitals; this presupposes capitals, presumes the relationship of capital as present, and therefore also implies its relations to labour, prices (capital fixe and circulant), interest and profit. But capital, in order to become capital, presupposes a certain accumulation which is already contained in the independent antithesis of objectified labour to living labour; in the independent existence of this antithesis. This accumulation, which is necessary for the genesis of capital, and is therefore already contained in its concept as premiss — as a moment — is to be distinguished essentially from the accumulation of capital which has already become capital, where capitals must already be available./
/ W e have already seen so far(7) that capital presupposes: (1) the process of production in general, as it is common to all social conditions, that is without historical character, human IF YOU PLEASE; (2) circulation, which is already a specific historical product in each of its moments, and still more in its totality; (3) capital as the specific unity of both.
Now, how far the general process of production is itself modified historically, as soon as it appears only as an element of capital, must emerge in the course of its analysis; just as capital's historical premisses in general must emerge from the simple conception of its distinctive characteristics.^
^Everything else is empty chatter. Which determinations belong to the first section, On Production in General, and in the first part of the second section, On Exchange Value in General, can only emerge at the end of and as a result of the whole analysis. For example, we have already seen(8) that the distinction between use value and exchange value belongs within political economy itself, and use value should not be passed over in silence as a simple premiss as in Ricardo. The chapter on production ends objectively with the product as result; that on circulation begins with the commodity, which is itself use value and exchange value (therefore also value distinct from both), circulation as the unity of both — which, however, is only formal, and therefore collapses in the commodity as mere object of consumption, extra-economic, and in exchange value as money become independent.^
The surplus value of capital at the end of the production process—a surplus value which is realised in the higher price of the product only in circulation, but realised in it as all prices are, by already being presupposed to it in thought, laid down, before they enter into it — signifies, if expressed according to the general concept of exchange value, that the labour time objectified in the product— or the quantity of labour (expressed in terms of rest, the magnitude of labour appears as a spatial quantity, but expressed in terms of motion it is measurable only by time)—is greater than that present in the original components of capital. Now this is possible only if the labour objectified in the price of labour is less than the living labour time which has been bought with it.
The labour time objectified in capital appears, as we have seen, as a sum made up of three parts: (a) the labour time objectified in the raw material; (b) the labour time objectified in the instrument; (c) the labour time objectified in the price of labour. Now, parts (a) and (b) remain unchanged as components of capital; even if they alter their form in the process, their physical modes of being, they remain unchanged as values. It is only (c) which capital exchanges for something qualitatively different: a given quantity of objectified labour for a quantity of living labour. If the living labour time were to reproduce only the labour time objectified in the price of labour, this exchange would also be purely formal, and in general with respect to value, there would only have been an exchange for living labour as another form of being of the same value, just as with respect to the value of the material and instrument of labour, only a change in its physical form of being has occurred. If the capitalist has paid the worker a price=one day's labour and the day's labour of the worker adds only one day's labour to the raw material and instrument, the capitalist would simply have exchanged exchange value in one form for exchange value in another. He would not have acted as capital. On the other hand, the worker would not have remained in the simple process of exchange: he would in fact have received the product of his labour in payment, except that the capitalist would have done him the favour of paying him the price of the product in advance before its realisation. The capitalist would have given him credit and gratis at that, pour le roi de Prusse!" Voila tout}"
The exchange between capital and labour, the result of which is the price of labour, even though for the worker it is a simple exchange, must for the capitalist be not-exchange. He must receive more value than he has given. From the point of view of capital, the exchange must be merely apparent, i.e. an economic category other than exchange, or else capital as capital and labour as labour in antithesis to it would be impossible. They would exchange for each other only as equal exchange values, which exist physically in different forms of being.
In order to vindicate capital, to defend it, the economists therefore take refuge in this simple [111-22] process; they explain capital by the very process which makes impossible its existence. In order to demonstrate it, they demonstrate it away. You pay me for my labour, exchange it for its own product, and deduct the value of the raw and other materials with which you have supplied me. That is to say, we are associates who bring different elements into the production process and exchange them according to their value. Thus the product is turned into money, and the money is divided up in such a way that you, the capitalist, obtain the price of your raw material and instrument, and I, the worker, get the price which labour has added to them. The benefit for you is that you now possess the raw material and the instrument in a consumable form; for me, that my labour has been valorised. Of course, you would soon be in the position of having consumed your capital in the form of money, while I as worker would get possession of both.
What the worker exchanges for capital is his labour itself (in the exchange, the right of disposing over it); he alienates it. What he receives as price is the value of this alienation. He exchanges the value-positing activity for a predetermined value, regardless of the result of his activity.
/ M r . Bastiat displays immense wisdom when he claims that the wage is an inessential, merely outward form; a form of association which as such has nothing to do with the economic relation of labour and capital.[3] If the workers were so well off, he says, as to be able to wait for the completion and sale of the product, the wage system, wage labour, would not hinder them from concluding a contract with the capitalist just as advantageous as that which one capitalist makes with another. Therefore the evil does not lie in the form of the wage system but in conditions independent of it. It does not occur to him, of course, that these conditions themselves are the conditions of the wage system. If the workers were also capitalists, they would in fact be related to non-labouring capital as labouring capitalists, not as labouring workers, i.e. not in the form of wage workers. Hence for Bastiat wages and profit are essentially the same as profit and interest. He calls this the harmony of economic relationships, meaning that economic relationships only seem to exist, while in essence, only one relationship exists — that of simple exchange. Hence the essential forms appear to him as in themselves without content, i.e. not as real forms./
Now, how is the worker's value determined? By the objectified labour contained in his commodity. This commodity exists in his vitality. In order to maintain it from day to day (we are not yet dealing with the working class, i.e. not with compensation for WEAR and TEAR by which it can maintain itself as a class, since here the worker faces capital as worker, as the presupposed perennial subject in antithesis to capital, not yet as a transient individual of the type "worker") he must consume a certain quantity of provisions, replace the consumed blood, etc. He receives only an equivalent. Hence tomorrow, after the conclusion of the exchange — and it is only after he has formally concluded the exchange that he carries it out in the process of production — his labour capacity will exist in the same way as before; he has received an exact equivalent, as the price he has received leaves him in possession of the same exchange value as he had before. Capital has paid him the quantity of objectified labour contained in his vitality. He has consumed it, and since it did not exist as a thing but as a capacity in a living being, he can renew the exchange in view of the specific nature of his commodity — the specific nature of the life process. Since we are not dealing here with specially skilled labour, but with labour pure and simple, we are not yet concerned with the fact that in addition to the labour time objectified in his vitality — i.e. to the labour time necessary to pay for the products required for the maintenance of his vitality — more labour is objectified in his immediate being, namely the values he has consumed in order to produce a specific labour capacity, a particular skill, the value of which is given by the costs of production of a similar specific skill.
If a whole working day were required in order to keep a worker alive for a working day, capital would not exist, because one working day would exchange for its own product. As a result, capital could not valorise itself as capital and thus could not preserve itself. The self-preservation of capital is its self-valorisation. If capital had to work in order to live, it would not preserve itself as capital but as labour. The ownership of raw materials and the instruments of labour would be purely nominal; [111-23] economically, they would belong just as much to the worker as to the capitalist, since they would produce value for the capitalist only in so far as he was himself a worker. He would therefore not treat them as capital but as mere physical matter and means of labour, just as the worker himself does in the process of production.
If, on the contrary, e.g. only half a working day is needed to keep a worker alive for a whole working day, a surplus value of the product is the automatic result, because the capitalist has paid in the price [of labour] only half a working day and he has received a whole working day objectified in the product; therefore has exchanged nothing for the second half of the working day. It is not exchange but a process in which he obtains without exchange objectified labour time, i.e. value, which alone can make him into a capitalist. Half the working day costs capital nothing; it therefore receives a value for which it has given no equivalent. And the augmentation of values can occur only because a value over and above the equivalent is obtained, hence created.
Speaking generally, surplus value is value over and above the equivalent. The equivalent, by definition, is only the identity of value with itself. Surplus value can never, therefore, spring from the equivalent; nor, therefore, can it spring originally from circulation. It must spring from the process of production of capital itself. The matter can also be expressed thus: if the worker requires only half a working day to live for a whole day, he needs to work only half a day to eke out his existence as a worker. The second half of the working day is forced labour; surplus labour.[98]
What appears on the side of capital as surplus value, appears on the worker's side precisely as surplus labour over and above his requirements as worker, hence over and above his immediate requirements to sustain his vitality.
The great historical aspect of capital is the creation of this surplus labour, superfluous from the point of view of mere use value, of mere subsistence, and its historical mission is fulfilled when, on the one hand, needs are developed to the point where surplus labour beyond what is necessary has itself become a general need and arises from the individual needs themselves; and on the other, when, by the strict discipline of capital to which successive generations have been subjected, general industriousness has been developed as the universal asset of the new generation; and, lastly, when the productive forces of labour, constantly whipped on by capital in its unbounded lust for enrichment, and in the conditions in which alone it can satisfy this lust, have been developed to the stage where the possession and preservation of general wealth requires from the whole of society only comparatively little labour time on the one hand, and on the other labouring society takes a scientific attitude towards the process of its continuing reproduction, its reproduction in ever greater abundance; so that labour in which man does what he can make things do for him has ceased.
Accordingly, capital and labour relate to each other here like money and commodity: if the one is the general form of wealth, the other is merely the substance seeking immediate consumption. As the ceaseless striving for the general form of wealth, however, capital forces labour beyond the limits of natural need and thus creates the material elements for the development of the rich individuality, which is as varied and comprehensive in its production as it is in its consumption, and whose labour therefore no longer appears as labour but as the full development of activity itself, in which natural necessity has disappeared in its immediate form; because natural need has been replaced by historically produced need. This is why capital is productive, i.e. an essential relationship for the development of the productive forces of society. It ceases to be such only where the development of these productive forces themselves encounters a barrier in capital itself.
The Times of November [21,] 1857 contains a most endearing scream of rage from a West Indian planter.(9) With great moral indignation this advocate — by way of plea for the reintroduction of Negro slavery — explains how the Quashees (the free blacks of Jamaica) content themselves to produce only what is strictly necessary for their own consumption and apart from this "use value", regard loafing itself (INDULGENCE and IDLENESS) as the real luxury article; how they don't give a damn about sugar and the fixed capital invested in the PLANTATIONS, but rather react with malicious pleasure and sardonic smiles when a planter goes to ruin, and even exploit their acquired Christianity as a cover for this sardonic mood and indolence.
They have ceased to be slaves, not in order to become wage workers, but SELF-SUSTAINING PEASANTS, working for their own meagre consumption. Capital as capital does not exist for them, because wealth made independent in general exists only either through direct forced labour, slavery, or through mediated forced labour, wage labour. Wealth confronts direct forced labour not as capital but as relationship of domination. On the basis of direct forced labour, therefore, only the relationship of domination is reproduced, for which wealth itself has value only as gratification, not as wealth as such, and which [111-24] can therefore never create general industriousness. (We shall come back later to this relationship between slavery and wage labour.)
The difficulty in grasping the genesis of [surplus] value is illustrated by (1) the modern English economists, who accuse Ricardo of failing to understand surplus [the excess of the value produced over the production costs], surplus value" (see Malthus on value,[100] who at least tries to proceed scientifically(10)), yet of all economists, Ricardo alone has grasped it, as his polemic against A. Smith's confusion of the determination of value by wages and by the labour time objectified in the commodity shows.(11)
The new economists are nothing but shallow simpletons. True, Ricardo himself often gets into confusion, because, although he understands the emergence of surplus value as the prerequisite of capital, he often falters in the attempt to understand on this basis(12)
the multiplication of values except by the investment of more objectified labour time in the same product, in other words only by production becoming more difficult. Hence the absolute contradiction between value and wealth in his theory.(13) Hence the one-sidedness of his theory of rent; his false theory of international trade, which is supposed to produce only use value (which he calls wealth), not exchange value.(14) The only remaining path leading to the multiplication of values as such, other than the growing difficulty of production (theory of rent), is the increase in population (the natural increase in the number of workers through the growth of capital), although he himself has nowhere coherent-ly analysed this relation. His fundamental error, that he nowhere examines what actually gives rise to the distinction between the determination of value by wages and its determination by objectified labour. Money and exchange itself (circulation) thus appear only as a purely formal element in his political economy; and although political economy according to him deals only with exchange value, profit, etc., appear only as a percentage share of the product, which is equally the case on the basis of slavery. He nowhere investigates the form of the mediation.
(2) The Physiocrats. Here the difficulty of understanding capital, the self-valorisation of value, hence the surplus value which capital creates in the act of production, stands out palpably, as it was bound to do with the fathers of modern political economy, just as at its ultimate classical conclusion with Ricardo, who [...] the creation of surplus value in the form of rent...(15) It is au fond the question of the concept of capital and wage labour, and hence the fundamental question which arises at the threshold of the system of modern society. The money system grasped the independence of value only in the form in which it emerges from simple circulation — as money; the monetarists therefore made this abstract form of wealth into the exclusive target of the nations, which were just then entering the period when enrichment as such appeared as the aim of society itself.
Then came the mercantile system, coinciding with the epoch in which industrial capital and therefore wage labour appeared in manufacture and developed in opposition to and at the cost of non-industrial wealth, feudal landed property. The mercantilists already dimly conceived money as capital, but really again only in the form of money, of the circulation of merchant capital, of capital turning itself into money. Industrial capital had for them a value, indeed the highest value — as means, not as wealth itself in its productive process — because it created merchant capital and this became money in the process of circulation. Manufacturing labour — i.e. au fond industrial labour. But agricultural labour, on the other hand, was and appeared to them as mainly productive of use value; raw produce processed is more valuable,because in this clear form, a form more suitable for circulation, for COMMERCE, a mercantile form, it produces more money (in this context, the historically evolved view of the wealth of non-agricultural nations, notably Holland, in contrast to the agricultural, feudal ones; agriculture did not appear at all in industrial but in feudal form, therefore as source of feudal, not bourgeois, wealth). One form of wage labour, industrial wage labour, and one form of capital, industrial capital, were thus recognised as a source of wealth, but only in so far as they created money. Exchange value itself was therefore not yet conceived of in the form of capital.
Now the Physiocrats. They distinguish capital from money and conceive it in its general form as exchange value made independent, preserving itself in and augmented by production. Hence they also consider the relation for itself, not as itself a moment of simple circulation but rather as its premiss, and as it continually reproduces itself in circulation as its premiss. The Physiocrats are therefore the fathers of modern political economy.[101]
They also understand that the positing of surplus value by wage labour is the self-valorisation of capital, i.e. its realisation. But how is surplus value created through capital, i.e. through existing values, by means of labour? Here they disregard the form altogether and consider only the simple process of production.
Hence only such labour can be productive which is carried on in a field where the natural power of the instrument of labour palpably allows the worker to produce more values than he consumes. Surplus value thus originates not from labour as such, but from the natural power used and directed by labour—[111-25] i.e. agriculture. Agricultural labour is thus the only productive labour, for this much the Physiocrats understand that only labour which, creates surplus value is productive. (That surplus value must express itself in the form of a material product, is a primitive view still to be encountered in A. Smith.(16) Actors are productive workers, not by virtue of the fact that they produce plays, but in so far as they INCREASE THEIR EMPLOYERS WEALTH. But what sort of labour is performed, in what form labour is materialised, is a matter of absolute indifference for this relationship. On the other hand, it is not indifferent from later points of view.) But this surplus value is imperceptibly transformed into a greater quantum of use value arising from production than that which was consumed in it. This multiplication of use values, the excess of the product above the component part of it which must be used for new production — of which a part can therefore be unproductively consumed, appears palpably only in the relationship of the natural seed to its product. Only a part of the harvest has to be directly returned to the soil as seed. In products themselves occurring naturally, in the elements, in air, water, soil, light, and in substances supplied through manure and otherwise, the seeds then reproduce that part in a multiplied quantity as grain, etc. In short, human labour has only to guide the chemical exchange of matter (in agriculture), partly also to promote it mechanically or to promote the reproduction of life itself (stock-raising) to obtain a surplus, i.e. to convert these same natural substances from a useless into a valuable form. The true form of general wealth is therefore the surplus of the products of the soil (grain, cattle, raw materials). From the economic viewpoint, therefore, only rent is a form of wealth. This is why the first prophets of capital recognise only the non-capitalist, the feudal landowner as the representative of bourgeois wealth. But then the consequence, the levying of all taxes on rent, is entirely to the advantage of bourgeois capital. The theory accords a bourgeois accolade to feudalism in principle — which misled many a feudal gentleman, like the elder Mirabeau — only in order to ruin it in the practical application.
All other values represent only raw material+labour; labour itself represents grain or other products of the soil which the worker consumes. Therefore the factory worker, etc., adds to the raw material no more than he consumes in raw materials. Neither he, by his labour, nor his employer, therefore, add anything to wealth — for wealth is the surplus above the commodities consumed in production — but only impart to it agreeable forms useful for consumption.
At that time the utilisation of the powers of nature in industry had not been developed, nor had the division of labour, etc., which increases the natural power of labour itself. But by Adam Smith's time this was the case. For him, therefore, labour in general is the source of value, as it is the source of wealth. But actually even labour posits surplus value only in so far as in the division of labour the surplus appears likewise as a gift of nature, as the natural power of society, just as with the Physiocrats it appeared as a gift of the soil. Hence the importance A. Smith attaches to the division of labour.
On the other hand, capital appears to him originally not as containing within itself the moment of wage labour, antagonistical-ly, but as it emerges from circulation, as money, and hence as it is created out of circulation through saving? Initially, therefore, capital does not valorise itself — precisely because the appropriation of another's labour has not been assimilated into its concept. It appears only subsequently, after it has already been presupposed as capital—mauvais cercleh—as command over alien labour. Thus labour should really receive its own product as wage according to A. Smith, the wage should be = to the product, therefore labour should not be wage labour, and capital not capital. Therefore, in order to introduce profit and rent as original elements of the production costs, i.e. to make a surplus value result from the process of production of capital, he presupposes them in the crudest form. The capitalist does not want his capital to be used for nothing; similarly, the landowner does not want to make his land available for production for nothing. They demand something in return. In this way, they and their demands are brought in as historical FACTS, not explained. Wages are really the only economically justified, because necessary, element of the production costs. Profit and rent are merely deductions from wages, arbitrarily enforced in the historical process by capital and landed property, and legally, not economically, justified.
But since on the other hand Smith opposes to labour the means and materials of production in the form of landed property and capital as independent elements, he has virtually posited labour as wage labour. Hence contradictions. Hence his vacillations in the determination of value; his placing of profit and rent at the same level; his false [111-26] views on the influence of wages upon prices, etc.
Now Ricardo (see 1(17)). He again understands wage labour and capital as a natural, not specific historical, social form of the production of wealth as use value, i.e. its form as such, precisely because it is conceived of as natural, is indifferent, and is not conceived in its specific relation to the form of wealth, just as wealth itself, in its form as exchange value, appears as a purely formal mediation of its physical existence. Therefore he does not understand the specific character of bourgeois wealth — just because it appears [to him] as the adequate form of wealth in general. Although his point of departure is exchange value, the specific economic forms of exchange themselves play economically no role at all in his political economy. Instead he only speaks about the distribution of the general product of labour and the soil among the three classes, as though wealth based on exchange value were only a matter of use value, and as though exchange value were only a ceremonial form, which in Ricardo disappears in quite the same manner as does money as means of circulation in exchange. To bring out the true laws of political economy, he therefore likes to refer also to this relation of money as a merely formal one. Therefore also his weaknesses in the basic theory of money proper.
The exact development of the concept of capital necessary, because it is the basic concept of modern political economy, just as capital itself, of which it is the abstract reflected image, is the basis of bourgeois society. The clear understanding of the basic premiss of the [capitalist] relationship must reveal all the contradictions of bourgeois production, as well as the limits at which this relationship outgrows itself.
^ I t is important to note that wealth as such, i.e. bourgeois wealth, is always expressed to the highest power in exchange value, where it is posited as mediator, as mediation between the extremes of exchange value and use value themselves. This middle term always appears as the completed economic relation, because it comprises the opposites, and always ultimately appears as a higher power than the extremes themselves, but in a one-sided way; because the movement or the relationship which originally appears as mediating between the extremes, must dialectically come to appear as mediation with it itself, as the subject of which the extremes are merely the elements. It transcends their autonomous premisses, and by doing so posits itself as that which alone is autonomous. An example in the religious sphere is Christ the mediator between God and man — mere instrument of circulation between them — becomes their unity, God-man, and as such becomes more important than God; the saints more important than Christ; the priests more important than the saints.
The total economic expression, itself one-sided as against the extremes, is always exchange value, where it is posited as middle link; e.g. money in simple circulation; capital itself as mediator between production and circulation. Within capital itself, one of its forms resumes the position of use value as against the other form as exchange value. Industrial capital, for example, appears as producer in relation to the merchant, who appears as circulation. So the former represents the physical aspect, and the latter the formal aspect, hence wealth as wealth. At the same time, merchant capital itself, in turn, mediates between production (industrial capital) and circulation (the consuming public) or between exchange value and use value, where both sides are posited alternately, production as money, circulation as use value (consuming public), or the first as use value (product) and the second as exchange value (money).
Likewise within trade itself: the wholesaler as mediator between manufacturer and retailer, or between manufacturer and farmer, or between different manufacturers, represents this same higher middle link. And again, the commodity brokers in relation to the wholesaler. Then the banker in relation to the industrialists and merchants; the joint-stock company in relation to simple production; the financier as mediator between the State and bourgeois society at the highest level.
Wealth as such represents itself the more distinctly and broadly the further it is removed from immediate production and itself mediates between aspects each of which, considered by itself, is already posited as a characteristic economic form. [This is due to the fact] that(18) money turns from means into an end, and the higher form of mediation as capital itself posits everywhere the lower form as labour, as merely source of surplus value. For example, the BILL-BROKER, banker, etc., in relation to the manufacturers and FARMERS, who for him are posited in the determination of labour (of use value), while he posits himself in relation to them as capital, production of surplus value; in the most extravagant form in the FINANCIER.^
Capital is the immediate unity of product and money, or, better, of production and circulation. So it is in turn itself something immediate, and its development consists in positing and transcend-ing itself as this unity, which is posited as a specific and therefore simple relation. The unity initially appears in capital as something simple.
[111-27] ^Ricardo's reasoning is simply this: Products are exchanged for each other — hence capital for capital — in the ratio of the quanta of objectified labour contained in them. A day's labour always exchanges for a day's labour. This is the assumption. Exchange itself can therefore be ignored altogether. The product — capital posited as product — is in itself exchange value, to which the act of exchange merely adds form, in Ricardo, formal form.
The only question now is: in what ratios the product is to be shared. These ratios are the same, whether they are regarded as specific quotas of the presupposed exchange value or of its content, material wealth. Indeed, since exchange as such is mere circulation — money as circulation — it is better to abstract from it altogether, and to consider only the proportions of material wealth which are distributed to the various agents within the process of production or as the result of that process. In the form of exchange, all value, etc., is purely nominal; it is real only in the form of the ratio. The entire exchange, in so far as it does not produce a greater material variety, is nominal. Since a whole day's labour is always exchanged for a whole day's labour, the sum of values remains the same — the growth of the productive forces affects only the content of wealth, not its form. Augmentation of value can therefore originate only in increased difficulty of production — and this can only occur in agriculture where the natural power of equal quantities of human labour no longer renders the same service, therefore the fertility of the natural elements declines. The fall of profits is therefore caused by rent.
Firstly the false assumption that a whole day's labour is always worked in all conditions of society; etc., etc. (see above (19)).^
We have seen(20): the worker needs to work for only (e.g.) half a working day to live a whole day, and thus be able to begin the same process on the following day. In his labour capacity — so far as it exists in him as a living being, or in him as a living instrument of labour — only half a working day is objectified. One whole living day (day of life) of the worker is the static result, the objectification of half a working day. The capitalist, by appropriating the whole working day in exchange for the labour objectified in the worker, i.e. in exchange for half a working day, and then consuming it in the production process by applying it to the materials of which his capital consists, in this way creates the surplus value of his capital — in the case assumed here, half a day of objectified labour.
Let us now assume that the productivity of labour doubles, i.e. a given amount of labour produces twice as much use value in the same time. (In the relation we are discussing here, use value is defined for the time being as that which the worker consumes to keep alive as a worker; the quantum of provisions for which, through the mediation of money, he exchanges the labour objectified in his living labour capacity.) The worker would then have to work for only [1]/[4] of a day to live a whole day; the capitalist then has to give only l/[4] of a day's objectified labour in exchange to the worker to increase his surplus value in the process of production from l/[2] to [3]/[4]; because he would gain, instead of V2 day's objectified labour, [3]/[4] of a day of it. The value of the capital, as it emerges from the process of production, would have increased by [3]/[4] instead of by [2]/[4].c The capitalist thus would need to require only [3]/[4] of a day's work to add to his capital the same surplus value — 7[2] or [2]/[4] of objectified labour.
But since capital represents the general form of wealth— money — it has a boundless and measureless urge to exceed its own limits. Every boundary is and must be a barrier for it. Otherwise it would cease to be capital, money reproducing itself. If a particular boundary were not to be a barrier for it, but one to which it could confine itself without difficulty, capital would itself have declined from exchange value to use value, from the general form of wealth to a particular substance of it. Capital as such creates a particular surplus value, because it cannot create an infinite one AT ONCE; but it is the constant drive to create more of it. The quantitative border to surplus value appears to it only as a natural barrier, as a necessity, which it constantly tries to overcome and beyond which it constantly tries to go.
^ The limitation appears as an accidental phenomenon which must be overcome. This is obvious even on the most superficial examination. If capital grows from 100 to 1,000, then 1,000 becomes the new point of departure from which further expansion must proceed; the ten-fold increase, by 1,000%, counts for nothing; profit and interest, in turn, become capital. What appeared as surplus value now appears as a simple premiss, etc., as comprised in the simple composition [of capital] itself.^
Hence (quite apart from the factors entering in later, competition, prices, etc.) the capitalist will not make the worker work only [3]/[4] of a day, because [3]/[4] of a day creates the same surplus value as did a whole day previously, he will make him work the full day; and the increased productive power, which enables the worker to live for a whole day on the basis of l/[4] of a working day, now expresses itself simply in the fact that he must now work [3]/[4] of a day [111-28] for capital, whereas he previously worked for it only [2]/[4] of a day. The increased productivity of his labour, in so far as it means shortening of the time necessary for the replacement of the labour objectified in him (for the use value, for the subsistence), appears as a lengthening of his labour time for the valorisation of capital (for the exchange value).
From the worker's point of view, he must now perform a surplus labour of [3]/[4] of a day to live a full day, while previously he had only to perform a surplus labour of [2]/[4] of a day. The increase, the doubling of his productive power has increased his surplus labour by lj[4] [of a day]. One thing should be noted here: productivity has doubled, the surplus labour performed by the worker has not; it has grown by only l/[4] [of a day]. Nor has the surplus value of capital doubled, it too has increased by only [1]/[4] [of a day, i.e. by 50%]. This shows that surplus labour (from the worker's point of view) or surplus value (from the point of view of capital) does not grow in the same numerical proportion as does productivity. How does this come about?
The doubling of productivity is the reduction of necessary labour[102] (for the worker) by [1]/[4] [of a day]; hence also the production of surplus value is [greater] by [1]/[4], because the original ratio assumed was V2- If the worker had to work, originally, [2]/[3] of a day to live one full day, the surplus value (as well as the surplus labour) would have been Vs. A doubling of the productivity of labour would then have enabled the worker to reduce the amount of necessary labour to one-half of [2]/[3], or — , [2]/[6] or V[3] of a day, and the capitalist would have gained V3 of [a day's surplus] value. The total surplus labour would amount to [2]/[3] [of a day]. The doubling of productivity, which in the first example resulted in an [extra] l/[4] of a day's surplus value and surplus labour, would now result in an [extra] V3 of a day's surplus value and surplus labour. The multiplier of productivity — the factor by which it is multiplied — is, therefore, [as a rule] not the multiplier of surplus labour or surplus value; if the original ratio of labour objectified in the price of labour was l/[2] of the labour objectified in one day's labour — and a day is always the limit[3]—then the doubling of productivity is tantamount to the division of V2 (the original ratio) by 2, or l/[4]. If the original ratio was [2]/[3], then the doubling is tantamount to the division of [2]/[3] by 2=[2]/[6] or V[3].
The multiplier of productivity is thus never the multiplier but always the divisor of the original ratio, not the multiplier of its numerator but of its denominator. If the former were the case, the multiplication of productivity would result in a corresponding multiplication of surplus value. But the [growth of] surplus value is always equal to a division of the original ratio by the multiplier of productivity. If the original ratio was [8]/[9], i.e. the worker needed [8]/[9] of the working day to live, and capital therefore gained only V9 of a day in the exchange with living labour, and surplus labour equalled V9, then, if productivity were doubled, the worker could earn his subsistence in one-half of [8]/[9] of the working day, i.e. with [8]/i8=4/g (it is the same whether we divide the numerator or multiply the denominator), and the capitalist, who orders a full day's work, would have a total surplus value of [5]/[9] of the working day; subtract from that the original surplus value of V[9], and [4]/[9] remains. The doubling of productivity in this case is thus tantamount to a growth of surplus value or surplus labour time by [4]/[9].
This is simply because surplus value always depends on the ratio between the whole working day and that part of it which is necessary for the worker to keep himself alive. The unit by which surplus value is calculated is always a fraction, i.e. the particular part of a day which exactly represents the price of labour. If this fraction = 72> the growth[3] of [111-29] productivity=reduction of necessary labour to [1]/[4]; if it=1/3, necessary labour is reduced to (21)/[6]; hence in the first [case] the total surplus value=[3]/[4], in the second = [5]/6- Relative surplus value,[104] i.e. [the increase] in relation to that previously obtained, in the first case=1/4, in the second = '/6-
The value of capital therefore does not grow in the same proportion as productivity grows, but in the proportion in which the increase of productivity, the multiplier of productivity, divides the fraction of the working day expressing the part of the day belonging to the worker. By how much [the growth of] the productivity of labour increases the value of capital thus depends on the original ratio of the part --of labour which is objectified in the worker to his living labour. This part always expresses itself as a fraction of the whole working day, V3, V3, etc. The increase in productivity, i.e. its multiplication by a certain number, is tantamount to a division of the numerator, or a multiplication of the denominator of this fraction by the same number. How large or small the increase in the value of capital is, depends therefore not only on the number expressing the multiplication of productivity, but equally on the previously given proportion expressing the part of the working day pertaining to the price of labour. If that proportion is V3, a doubling of the productivity of the working day means a reduction of the proportion to 7[6]; if the proportion is [2]/[3], a reduction to [2]/[6].
The objectified labour contained in the price of labour is always equal to a fraction of the whole working day; always arithmetically expressed by a fraction; always a numerical ratio, never a simple number. If productivity doubles, is multiplied by 2, the worker needs to work only V2 the former time to cover the price of labour; but it depends on the initially given ratio, namely on the time he required before the increase in productivity, how much labour time he now still requires for this purpose. The multiplier of productivity is the divisor of the original fraction. [Surplus] value or surplus labour, therefore, does not grow in the same numerical proportion as does productivity. If the original ratio is V2 and productivity doubles, the necessary labour time (for the worker) is accordingly reduced to [1]/[4] [of the working day] and surplus value grows by only [1]/[4] [of the working day]. If productivity is multiplied four-fold, the original ratio changes to Vs and [surplus] value grows by only [3]/[8].
[Surplus] value can never be equal to the whole working day, i.e. a definite part of the working day must always be exchanged for the labour objectified in the worker. Altogether, surplus value is always determined by the ratio of living labour to that objectified in the worker; this [the latter] part of the ratio must therefore always remain. By the very fact that the ratio is constant as a ratio, although its factors vary, a definite correlation is already given between an increase in productivity and an increase in [surplus] value. On the one side, we thus see that the relative surplus value is exactly equal to the relative surplus labour. If the [necessary] working day was l/[2] and productivity doubled, then the part of the working day belonging to the worker, necessary labour, is reduced to V4 [of the working day] and the newly created [surplus] value is also exactly l/[4]; but total [surplus] value is now [3]/[4]. While surplus value has risen by ]/[4], i.e. in the ratio of 1:4, the total [surplus] value = [3]/[4] of the working day, i.e. the ratio=3:4.
If we now assume U to have been the originally necessary working day, and a doubling of productivity to have occurred, then necessary labour is reduced to 7s> a n d [the increase in] surplus labour or surplus value exactly = 7s =1-'8. On the other hand, total surplus value = 7:8. In the first example, total surplus value was originally =1:2 (V2) a n d then rose to 3:4; in the second case it was originally [3]/[4] and has now risen to 7:8 ([7]/[8]). In the first case it grew from /[2] or [2]/[4] to [3]/[4]; in the second, from [3]/[4] or [6]/[8] to [7]/[8]; in the first case by XIA, in the second by ï/[8]; i.e. in the first case the increase was twice as big as in the second; [111-30] but in the first case total surplus value [after the doubling of productivity] is only [3]/[4] or [6]/s, while in the second it is [7]/[8], therefore 7s more.
Let us assume the necessary labour to be Vi6: then total surplus value = [15]/i[6] which is [3]/[16] higher than in the previous case, where total surplus value was taken to be [6]/s—[12]/i6- Let us assume now a doubling of productivity: necessary labour now =732 5 previously it was = [2]/[32] (7ie); therefore surplus [labour] time has risen by l/[32], hence also surplus value. Let us consider total surplus value, which was [15]/[16] or [3]% [2]; it is now [3]732- As compared to the earlier relation (where necessary labour was 74 or [8]/[32]), total surplus value is now [3]732> while in the earlier example it was only [28]/32> so the difference equals [3]/[32]. But considered relatively, the increase in surplus value resulting from the doubling of productivity equalled in the former case 7s o r 4/:«> whereas now it equals only 732» i-e- it is less by [3]/[32]-
If necessary labour had already been reduced to 71,000» total surplus value would be 999/i,0oo- Now, if productivity increased a thousand-fold, necessary labour would decline to V 1,000,000 of a
working day and total surplus value would amount to 999'999/1,000,000 of a working day; while before this increase in productivity it amounted only to 999/i,00o or 999'000/1,000,000 of a working day; it would thus have grown by [9]"A, 000,000= 11,001 (with the addition of î-— ), i.e. the thousand-fold increase in productivity 1,001+ /9gQ would not have raised total surplus [value] by even 7i,ooi, i.e. not even by [3]/s,oo3> while in the previous case surplus value rose by V32 a s a result of a mere doubling in productivity. If necessary labour declines from V 1,000 to Vi.ooo.ooo» it declines by exactly "'Vi.ooo.ooo (for V1,000 =[1]'000/1,000,000), i.e., by as much as surplus value rose.
If we summarise all this, we find: Firstly: T h e increase in the productivity of living labour increases the value of capital (or diminishes the value of the worker), not because it increases the quantity of products or use values produced with a given amount of labour — productivity of labour is its natural power — but because it reduces necessary labour and thus in the same proportion creates surplus labour, or, what amounts to the same thing, surplus value; because the surplus value of capital, which it obtains by means of the process of production, consists solely in the excess of surplus labour over necessary labour. The increase in productivity can only increase surplus labour, i.e., the excess of labour objectified in capital as a product over that objectified in the exchange value of the working day, in so far as it reduces the ratio of necessary labour to surplus labour, and only in the proportion to which it reduces this ratio. Surplus value is exactly equal to surplus labour; its increase is measured exactly by the reduction of necessary labour.
Secondly: The surplus value of capital does not increase in the same way as the multiplier of productivity, i.e. by the number by which productivity (posited as a unity, as multiplicant) is increased; but by the surplus of the fraction of the living working day which originally represents necessary labour over and above the same fraction divided by the multiplier of productivity. Thus if necessary labour — lU of the living working day, and productivity doubles, the [surplus] value of capital does not double but [111-31] grows by 7[8]; which is equal to l/[4] or [2]/[8] (the original fraction of the working day which represents necessary labour) —V4 divided by 2, or=[2]/[8]—[1]/s=l/s. (Value doubles, which can also be expressed thus: it grows [4]/[2]-fold or [16]/[8]-fold. If in the above example,[105] therefore, productivity grew by [16]/8, profita would rise by only Vs- Its growth would relate to that of productivity as Vi6-b (THAT IS IT!) If the fraction was Vi.ooo and productivity increased a thousand-fold, the value of capital would grow not a thousand-fold but by less than Vi.ooiî it would grow by Vi.ooo ~ Vi.ooo.ooo, i.e.
i 1,000/ _ [1] / _ 9 9 9 / x D y /1,000,000 /1,000,000— /1,000,000/• The absolute sum by which capital increases its value because of a certain increase in productivity depends, therefore, on the given fraction of the working day, on the fractional part of the working day, which represents necessary labour, and which therefore expresses the original ratio of necessary labour to the living working day. The expansion of productivity in a given proportion, therefore, may increase the value of capital differently e.g. in the different countries. A general increase in productivity in the same proportion may increase the value of capital differently in different branches of industry, and will do so according to the different ratios of necessary labour to the living working day in these branches. This ratio would of course be the same in all branches of business in a system of free competition, if labour were in all cases simple labour, and hence necessary labour were the same. (If it represented the same amounts of objectified labour.)
Thirdly: The greater the surplus value of capital before the increase in productivity, i.e. the greater the quantum of surplus labour or surplus value of capital presupposed, or the smaller the fraction of the working day which constitutes the equivalent of the worker and expresses necessary labour, the smaller is the growth of surplus value accruing to capital from increased productivity. The surplus value of capital rises, but in an ever diminishing ratio to the development of productivity. Thus the more developed capital already is, the more surplus labour it has already created, the more tremendously must it develop productivity if it is to valorise itself, i.e. to add surplus value even in a small proportion — because its barrier always remains the ratio between that fractional part of the working day which expresses necessary labour and the whole working day. It can move only within these limits. The smaller the fractional part already which represents necessary labour, the greater the surplus labour, the less can any increase in productivity perceptibly diminish necessary labour; for the denominator [of the fraction] has grown enormously. The self-valorisation of capital becomes more difficult to the extent to which it is already valorised. The increase in productivity could become a matter of indifference to capital; its valorisation itself could cease to matter, because its proportions have become minimal; and it would have ceased to be capital.
If necessary labour were V 1,000 a n d productivity tripled, necessary labour would fall only to Vs.ooo or surplus labour would have grown by only (22)/3,ooo- But this happens not because wages or the share of labour in the product have increased, but because they have already fallen so low, considered in relation to the product of labour or the living working day.
^ The labour objectified in the worker here shows itself as a fractional part of his own living working day; for this is the same ratio as that between the objectified labour he receives from capital as his wage and the whole working day.^
(All these propositions correct in this degree of abstraction only for the relation at this particular stage of the analysis. Further relations will come in later which modify them significantly. All this, in so far as it does not [present] itself in the most general form, really belongs in the doctrine of profit.)
So much in general for the time being: the development of the productivity of labour — in the first place the positing of surplus labour — is a necessary condition for the growth of the value or the valorisation of capital. As an infinite drive for enrichment, capital strives for an infinite enlargement of the productive forces of labour and calls them into being. But on the other hand, every enlargement of the productivity of labour — apart from the fact that it increases use values for the capitalist — is an increase in the productivity of capital and is, from the present standpoint, only a productive force of labour in so far as it is a productive force of capital/*
[ Absolute and Relative Surplus Value]
[111-32] This much is already clear and can at least be mentioned in anticipation: the increase in productivity does not in and by itself raise prices.[3] For example, the bushel of wheat. If half a working day were objectified in a bushel of wheat, and this was the price of the worker, the surplus labour can only produce 1 bushel of wheat. 2 bushels of wheat therefore the value of one working day and, if this in money=26s., then 2 bushels of wheat=26s. T h e bushel=13s.
If productivity now doubles, the bushel of wheat now only=74 of a working day; = 672s- T h e price of this fractional part of the commodity has fallen because of the [doubling of] productivity. But the total price has remained the same; but now surplus of [3]/[4] of a working day. Every q u a r t e r = l bushel of wheat=672 s-Therefore the total product=26s.=4 bushels. T h e same as before. T h e value of capital increased from 13 to 18[3]/[2]s. The value of labour diminished from 13s. to 6V2; material production u p from 2 bushels to 4. [The surplus value of capital] now 18[3]/[2].
If productivity also doubled in gold production, so that if 13s. was previously the product of half a working day, and half a working day the necessary labour; now of l/[4] [of a working day], so produces 52s., or 52 — 13, or 39s. more. 1 bushel of wheat now=13s.; now, as before, the same fractional price; but the total product=52s.; earlier only=26s. But on the other hand, the 52s. now buy 4 bushels, while the 26 earlier bought only 2.
WELL. D'abord, it is clear that, if capital has already raised the surplus labour so far that the whole living working day is consumed in the process of production (and here we take the working day to be the natural quantum of labour time which the worker can place at the disposal [of capital]; he always puts his capacity to work at the disposal of capital only for a specific time, i.e. a specific labour time), then an increase in productivity cannot increase labour time, nor, therefore, objectified labour time. O n e working day is objectified in the product, WHETHER THE NECESSARY TIME OF LABOUR BE REPRESENTED BY 6 OR 3 HOURS, BY V2 O R V4 of the working day. The surplus value of capital has grown, i.e. its value relative to the worker — for if previously it was only= [2]/ [4], it is now= [3]/ [4] of the objectified labour time; but its value has grown, not because the absolute but because the relative amount of labour has grown, i.e. the total amount of labour has not grown. Now, as before, one day's work is done; hence no absolute increase in surplus time (surplus labour time), but the amount of necessary labour has diminished, and thereby the relative surplus labour has increased.
Previously, the worker IN FACT worked the whole day, but only [1]/[2] day surplus time; now, as before, he works the whole day, but [3]/[4] of the working day is surplus time. To that extent, therefore, the price (assuming the value of gold and silver to remain the same) or the exchange value of capital has not increased as a result of the doubling of productivity. This therefore affects the rate of profit, not the price of the product nor the value of the capital which has been changed back into a commodity in the form of the product. But IN FACT the absolute values also increase in this way, because the part of wealth posited as capital increases — as self-valorising value. (Accumulation of capitals.)
Take our earlier example.[3] Let capital be =100 thaler, and let it split itself up in the process of production into the following component parts: 50 thaler cotton, 40 thaler wages, 10 thaler the instrument. Assume also, to simplify the calculation, that the whole of the instrument of labour is consumed in one act of production (and this assumption here as yet quite insignificant), its value would therefore reappear completely, in the form of the product. Let us assume, in this case, that labour gives 8 hours to capital in exchange for 40 thaler, which expresses the labour time objectified in its living labour capacity, say, a labour time of 4 hours. The instrument and raw material assumed, the total product would amount to 100 thaler if the worker worked for only 4 hours, i.e. if the raw material and instrument belonged to him and he worked for only 4 hours. He would increase the 60 thaler by 40, which he could consume, since he firstly replaces the 60 thaler — the raw material and instrument required for production— and [secondly] adds to them a surplus value of 40 thaler, as reproduction of his own living labour capacity, or of the time objectified in him. He could recommence labour again and again, since he has reproduced in the process of production both the [111-33] value of the raw material and the instrument and of his labour capacity; the latter by constantly increasing the value of the former by 4 hours of objectified labour! But now let him receive the wages of 40 thaler only if he worked for 8 hours, i.e. if he added to the material and instrument of labour now confronting him as capital a surplus value of 80 thaler; while the former surplus value of 40 thaler that he added was exactly equal to only the value of his labour. He would thus add [to the value of the raw material, the instrument and his labour capacity] a surplus value exactly=the surplus labour or surplus time.
y^\X. is not in the least necessary at this point to assume that the material and instrument must also increase along with surplus labour or surplus time. For how mere surplus labour increases the raw material, see Babbage, e.g. the working of gold filament [in Venice], etc. (1)^
The value of the capital would therefore have increased from 100 thaler to 140 thaler.
^Suppose further that the raw material doubles and the instrument of labour increases (for simplicity of calculation) [proportionally]. The outlays of capital would now amount to 100 thaler cotton, 20 thaler instrument, therefore 120 thaler, and for labour now, as before, 40 thaler; ALTOGETHER 160 thaler. If the surplus labour of 4 hours increases 100 thaler by 40% it increases 160 thaler by 64 thaler. Therefore the total product=224 thaler. Here it is assumed that the rate of profit remains the same with the magnitude of capital, and the material and instrument of labour are not considered as already being themselves realisations of surplus labour, capitalisation of surplus time; as we have seen,(2)
the greater the surplus time already posited, i.e. the greater the size of capital as such, the more it is assumed that the absolute increase in labour time impossible and that relative increase DECLINING in geometrical proportion, because of increased productivity.^
Now, capital considered as simple exchange value would be absolutely greater, 140 thaler instead of 100; but IN FACT only a new value would be produced, i.e. a value which is not necessary just to replace the outlays of 60 thaler for the material and instrument of labour and 40 thaler for labour, a new value of 40 thaler. The values present in the circulation would be increased by 40 thaler, by 40 thaler more objectified labour time.
Now make the same assumption as before. 100 thaler capital; namely 50 for cotton, 40 thaler for labour, 10 for the instrument of production; let surplus labour time remain the same as in the previous case, namely 4 hours, and the total labour time 8 hours. Hence the product in all cases only=8 hours labour time =140 thaler. Suppose now that the productivity of labour doubles, i.e. 2 hours would be sufficient for the worker to utilise the raw material and instrument to the extent necessary for the maintenance of his labour capacity. If 40 thaler were the labour time of 4 hours objectified in silver, then 20 thaler would be the objectified labour time of 2 hours. These 20 thaler now express the same use value as earlier the 40 thaler did. The exchange value of labour capacity has diminished by half, because half the original labour time creates the same use value, while the exchange value of the use value is measured only by the labour time objectified in it.
But the capitalist makes the worker work 8 hours as before, and his product therefore represents as before a labour time of 8 hours = 80 thaler labour time, while the value of raw material and instrument has remained the same, namely 60 thaler; ALTOGETHER, as before, 140 thaler.
(The worker himself to live would only have had to add to the 60 thaler present as raw material and instrument a value of 20 thaler, he would therefore have produced a value of 80 thaler. Because of the doubling of productivity the total value of his product would have diminished from 100 to 80, by 20 thaler, i.e. by 7[5] of 100 = 20%.)
But the surplus time or surplus value of capital is now 6 hours instead of 4, or 60 thaler instead of 40. Its increase is 2 hours, 20 thaler. The capitalist's calculation would now run thus: for raw material 50, for labour 20, for instrument 10; total outlay = 80 thaler. Gain=60 thaler. The capitalist would sell the product for 140 thaler as before, but make a gain of 60 thaler instead of the previous 40. In one respect he throws into circulation only the same exchange value as before, 140 thaler, but the surplus value of his capital has grown by 20 thaler. Accordingly, only his share in the 140 thaler [is] the rate of his profit. The worker has IN FACT worked gratis for him for 2 more hours; namely 6 hours instead of 4, and for him it is* the same as if he had worked 10 instead of 8 hours, i.e. increased his absolute labour time, under the earlier condition.
But in fact, a new value has emerged, too, namely, 20 thaler more are posited as independent value, as objectified labour, which has become free, relieved of the necessity merely to serve for the exchange of the previous labour power [Arbeitskraft]. This can occur in two forms. Either the 20 thaler are used to set as much additional labour in motion as corresponds to their becoming capital and creating increased exchange value, i.e. to their making a greater quantity of objectified labour into the starting point of the new production process. Or the capitalist exchanges the 20 thaler as money for commodities other than those he requires in his production as industrial [111-34] capital; in that case all commodities other than labour and money itself exchange for 20 thaler more, for 2 more hours of objectified labour time. Their exchange value, therefore, has risen by precisely this sum which has been set free.
IN FACT, 140 thaler are 140 thaler, as the very "astute" French publishera of the Physiocrats observes in opposition to Boisguillebert. But it is false that these 140 thaler represent only more use value; they represent a greater part of independent exchange value, of money, of latent capital; therefore of wealth posited as wealth. This the economists themselves concede when they later allow the accumulation of capitals to comprise not only the increase in the mass of use values but that in exchange values too; for according to Ricardo himself,a the element of the accumulation of capitals is posited just as completely by relative surplus labour — and indeed it cannot be otherwise — as it is by absolute surplus labour.
On the other hand, it is already implicit in the thesis best developed by Ricardo himself[107] that these excess 20 thaler which are created purely by the increase in productivity, can again become capital. Of the 140 thaler, only 40 could earlier have become new capital (leaving aside the consumption of capital for the moment); 100 thaler did not become but remained capital. Now 60 thaler can become new capital, therefore a capital of an exchange value of 20 thaler more is now available. Exchange values, wealth as such, have therefore increased, although now, as before, the total sum of wealth has not directly increased. Why has wealth increased? Because there has been an increase in that part of its total sum which is not merely means of circulation but money, or which is not merely an equivalent but exchange value existing for itself.
The 20 thaler set free would either be accumulated as money, i.e. added to the existing exchange values in the abstract form of exchange value, or they all pass into circulation, and then the prices of the commodities purchased with them rise. They all represent more gold, and, since the cost of production of gold has not fallen (rather it has risen relative to the commodity produced with the capital which has become more productive), more objectified labour. (As a result, the surplus, which initially appeared on the side of one producing capital, now appears on the side of the other capitals which produce the commodities that have become dearer.) Or the 20 thaler are directly utilised by the original circulating capital itself as capital. In this way a new capital of 20 thaler — a sum of self-preserving and self-valorising wealth — is posited. Capital has risen by the exchange value of 20 thaler.
(We are not really concerned yet with circulation, for we are dealing here with capital in general, and circulation can only mediate between the form of capital as money and its form as capital; capital as money may realise money as such, i.e. exchange it for commodities, which it consumes in greater quantity than before; in the hands of the producer of these commodities, however, this money is converted into capital. It thus becomes capital either directly in the hands of the first capital, or by a detour, in those of another capital. But the other capital is always once more capital as such; and we are dealing here with capital as such, SAY THE CAPITAL OF THE WHOLE SOCIETY. We are not yet dealing with the difference, etc., between capitals.)
In general, these 20 thaler can appear only in two forms: [(1)] as money, so that capital itself once more adopts the determination of money which has not yet become capital — its point of departure; the abstract-autonomous form of exchange value or general wealth; or [(2)] again as capital, as a new domination of objectified labour over living. As general wealth materialised in the form of money (of the thing where it is merely abstract), or as new living labour.
^ I n the example given productivity has doubled, has risen by 100%, the [surplus] value of capital has risen by 5 0 % . ^
(Every expansion of the mass of capital employed can increase productive power not only in an arithmetic but in a geometric proportion, while — precisely as the multiplier of productive power — it can increase profit only at a much lower rate. The effect of the increase of capital upon the increase in productive power is therefore infinitely greater than that of the increase of productive power upon the growth of capital.)
Of the 140 thaler, the capitalist consumes (say) 20 as use values for himself by means of money as the medium of circulation. Thus, under the first assumption, he could begin the process of self-valorisation only with a greater capital, with a greater exchange value of 120 thaler (as against 100). After the doubling of productivity, he can do it with 140 thaler, without restricting his consumption. A greater part of the exchange values fixes itself as exchange value, instead of disappearing in use value (whether it directly fixes itself in this way or indirectly through production). To create a larger capital means to create a larger exchange value: although exchange value in its direct form as simple exchange value has not been increased by the growth of productivity, it has been increased in its intensified form as capital.
This larger capital of 140 thaler(3) represents absolutely more objectified labour than did the earlier capital of 120 thaler. [111-35] It thus sets in motion, at least relatively, more living labour, and thus also ultimately reproduces a greater simple exchange value. The capital of 120 thaler at [a rate of profit of] 40% produced a product or simple exchange value of 60 thaler at 40%; the capital of 140 thaler, a simple exchange value of 64 thaler.(4) Here then the augmentation of exchange value in the form of capital is also directly posited as an increase of exchange value in its simple form.
It is of the highest importance to grasp this. It is not enough to say, as Ricardo does, that [with increased productivity] exchange value, i.e. the abstract form of wealth, does not increase, but only exchange value as capital.(5) In saying this, he only means the original process of production. But when relative surplus labour increases — and thus capital increases absolutely — the relative e x c h a n g e v a l u e existing as exchange value, money as such, necessarily increases within circulation, and thereby, through the mediation of the production process, also absolute exchange value. In other words: a part of this same amount of exchange value (or money) — and it is in this simple form that the product of the process of valorisation appears—(the product is surplus value only in relation to capital, to value as it existed prior to the production process; for itself, considered as independent existence, it is merely quantitatively determined exchange value)—has been set free which does not exist as equivalent for existing exchange values nor for existing labour time. If it is exchanged for the existing exchange values, it gives them not an equivalent but more than an equivalent, and therefore sets free a part of the exchange value on their side. In a state of rest, this released exchange value, by which society has enriched itself, can only be money; and then only the abstract form of wealth is increased; when in motion, it can only realise itself in new living labour (it may be that previously unemployed labour is set in motion or that new workers are created (population [growth] is accelerated); or again that a new circle of exchange values is created, that the circle of exchange values in circulation is enlarged, which can occur on the production side, if the released exchange value opens up a new branch of production, therefore [creates] a new object of exchange, objectified labour in the form of a new use value; or finally that the same is achieved by the introduction of objectified labour into the sphere of circulation in a new country by means of the expansion of trade). This [new living labour] must therefore be created [by raising productivity].
The form in which Ricardo tries to clarify the matter for himself (and he is very unclear in this respect), au fond amounts to nothing more than that he at once brings in a certain relationship, instead of simply saying that of the same sum of simple exchange values a smaller part is posited in the form of simple exchange value (equivalent) and a larger part in the form of money (of money as the original, antediluvian form, which constantly gives rise to capital; of money in its determination as money, not as coin, etc.); that therefore the part posited as exchange value for itself, i.e. as value, increases, wealth in its form as wealth(6) (whereas he comes to exactly the wrong conclusion that wealth increases only in its material, physical form as use value). The origin of wealth as such, in so far as it does not proceed from rent, i.e. according to him not from the increase of productivity but, on the contrary, from its diminution, is therefore totally incomprehensible to him, and he gets entangled in the craziest contradictions.
Let us take the matter in his form. Capital 1,000 sets in motion 50 workers; or 50 living working days. By a doubling of productivity, it could set 100 working days in motion. But these latter do not exist in his premiss and are arbitrarily brought in, because otherwise — if no more real working days are brought in — he does not understand the increase of exchange value arising from increased productivity. On the other hand, the growth of population is nowhere analysed by him as an element in the increase of exchange values; he doesn't even clearly and definitely mention it.
Let the given assumption be capital 1,000 and workers 50. The correct deduction — and he draws it (see Notebook[108]): 500 capital with 25 workers can [with productivity doubling] produce the same use value as before; the other 500 with the other 25 workers starts a new business and also produces exchange value of 500. Profit remains the same, since it arises not from the exchange of the 500 for the 500, but from the proportions in which profit and the wages of labour originally share in the 500, and the exchange is, rather, that of equivalents, which can increase value here no more than it can in foreign trade, in relation to which Ricardo explicitly demonstrates this.(7) For exchange of equivalents implies nothing more than that the value which existed in the hand of A before the exchange with B, still exists in his hand after the exchange with B.
Total value or wealth has remained the same [after the doubling of productivity]. But the use value or the physical substance of wealth has doubled. Now, there is absolutely no reason why wealth as wealth, exchange value as such, should grow at all — so far as the increase in the productive forces is concerned. If the productive forces are doubled in both [111-36] branches again, capital a can again be divided into two of 250 with I2V2 days labour each, and capital b can do the same. There are now four capitals, with the same exchange value of £1,000, consuming, as before, altogether 50 living working days ^ i t is au fond wrong to say that living labour consumes capital; capital (objectified labour) consumes living labour in the production process^- and producing four times as much use value [as] before the doubling of consumption value.
Ricardo is too classical to commit the absurdities of those who claim to improve him, who ascribe the increase in value resulting from the growth of productivity to the fact that one party sells more dearly in circulation. Instead of exchanging the capital of 500, so soon as it has become commodity, simple exchange value, for 500, he exchanges it for 550 (at 10%), but obviously the other obtains in exchange only 450 instead of 500, and the total sum remains 1,000 as before. This occurs quite frequently in trade, but it explains the profit of one capital only by the loss of the other capital, hence not the profit as such of capital as such, and without this premiss, there can be profit neither on one side nor the other.
Ricardo's process [the growth of the mass of use values] can therefore continue without coming up against any other limitation than that of the increase in productivity (and this is again physical, initially located outside the economic relation itself) which is possible with a capital of 1,000 and 50 workers. See the following passage:
"Capital is that part of the wealth of a country which is EMPLOYED WITH A VIEW
TO FUTURE PRODUCTION, AND MAY BE INCREASED IN THE SAME MANNER AS WEALTH" [On the Principles of Political Economy, and Taxation, p. 327].
(WEALTH is for him here the abundance of use values, and considered from the standpoint of simple exchange, the same objectified labour can express itself in unlimited use values and always remain the same exchange value, so long as it remains the same amount of objectified labour, since its equivalent is measured not by the mass of use values in which it exists but by its own amount.)
" A N ADDITIONAL CAPITAL WILL BE EQUALLY EFFICACIOUS IN THE FORMATION 1 0 9 OF FUTURE WEALTH, WHETHER IT BE OBTAINED FROM IMPROVEMENTS OF SKILL OR MACHIN-
ERY, OR FROM USING MORE REVENUE PRODUCTIVELY; FOR WEALTH" ( u s e v a l u e ) "ALWAYS DEPENDS ON THE QUANTITY OF COMMODITIES PRODUCED" (also to some extent on their VARIETY, IT SEEMS), "WITHOUT REGARD TO THE FACILITY WITH WHICH THE INSTRUMENTS EMPLOYED IN PRODUCTION MAY HAVE BEEN PRODUCED" (i.e. the labour time objectified in them). "A CERTAIN QUANTITY OF CLOTHES AND PROVISIONS WILL MAINTAIN AND EMPLOY THE SAME NUMBER OF MEN; BUT THEY WILL BE OF TWICE THE VALUE" (exchange value) "IF 200 HAVE BEEN EMPLOYED ON THEIR PRODUCTION" [ibid., pp. 327-28].
If by means of the increase in productivity 100 produce as much in use values as 200 did earlier, then:
"half of the 200 are dismissed, thus the remaining 100 produce as much as did the previous 200. One-half of the capital can therefore be withdrawn from the branch of industry; just as much capital has been released as labour. And since half the capital performs exactly the same service as previously the entire capital did, two capitals are now formed, etc." (cf. ibid., pp. 39, 40 on international trade,[110] to which we must return).
Ricardo does not speak here about the working day; that, if the capitalist previously exchanged half a day's objectified labour for the entire living working day of the worker, he gained, au fond, only half a living working day, since he gives the other half to the worker in objectified form and gets it back from him in the form of living labour, i.e. pays the worker half a working day, [he presents it] rather in the form of simultaneous working days, i.e. of the working days of different workers. This changes nothing in the substance of the matter, only in its expression. [As a result of the increase in productive power] each of these working days provides so much more surplus time. If formerly the capitalist's limit was the working day, he now has 50 days, etc. As has been said, in this form the increase in the number of capitals arising from the increase in productivity, does not posit any increase in exchange values; and, according to Ricardo, the population could also decline from say 10,000,000 to 10,000 without a decrease in exchange value or in the quantity of use values (see the conclusion of his booka).
We are the last to deny that contradictions are contained in capital. Indeed, it is our aim to analyse them fully. But Ricardo does not analyse them. He SHIFTS THEM OFF BY CONSIDERING THE VALUE IN
EXCHANGE AS INDIFFERENT FOR THE FORMATION OF WEALTH. T H A T IS TO SAY, HE
CONTENDS THAT IN A SOCIETY BASED UPON THE VALUE OF EXCHANGE, AND WEALTH
RESULTING FROM SUCH VALUE, THE CONTRADICTIONS WHICH THIS FORM OF WEALTH IS
DRIVEN TO WITH THE DEVELOPMENT OF PRODUCTIVE POWERS ETC. DO NOT EXIST, AND
THAT A PROGRESS OF VALUE IS NOT NECESSARY IN SUCH A SOCIETY TO SECURE THE
PROGRESS OF WEALTH, [ 1 1 1 - 3 7 ] CONSEQUENTLY THAT VALUE AS THE FORM OF WEALTH
DOES NOT AT ALL AFFECT THAT WEALTH ITSELF AND ITS DEVELOPMENT, i . e . h e considers exchange value as merely formal.
But then he suddenly remembers that (1) capitalists are concerned with VALUE; (2) historically, the progress of the productive forces (just as of international trade — he should have thought of this) has been accompanied by the growth of wealth as such, i.e. of the sum of values. How does he explain this? Capitals accumulate more quickly than the population; therefore wages rise; therefore population; therefore the price of grain; therefore the difficulty of production and therefore exchange values. Thus, the latter are finally reached by a detour.
We still here omit altogether the element of rent for at this stage we are concerned not with greater difficulty of production but on the contrary with the growth of the productive forces. With the accumulation of capitals, wages rise, unless population grows simultaneously; the worker marries, stimulus is given to propagation or his children live better, do not die prematurely, etc. In short, the population grows. But its growth leads to competition among the workers, and thus compels the worker once again to sell his labour capacity to the capitalist at, or even for a time below, its value. Now the accumulated capital, which in the meantime has grown more slowly, disposes over the surplus — once more as money — which it laid out before in the form of wages, that is as coin, to buy the use value of labour; as money, the surplus can be utilised as capital in exchange for [new] living labour, and since it now also disposes over greater quantities of working days, its exchange value grows again.
(Even this not properly analysed by Ricardo, but mixed up with the theory of rent; for the growth of population now deprives capital of the surplus in the form of rent, which it lost before in the form of wages.) But even the growth of population is not really comprehensible in his theory. Nowhere does he show that there is an immanent relationship between the whole of the labour objectified in capital and the living working day (whether this is represented as a working day of 50x12 hours or as 12 hours' work by 50 workers, is the same as far as the relationship is concerned), and that this immanent relationship is precisely the proportion of the fractional part of the living working day, or of the equivalent for the objectified labour, with which the worker is paid, to the [whole] living working day; where the whole is the day itself and the immanent relationship is the variable proportion (the day itself is a constant magnitude) of the fraction of the necessary hours of labour to that of the hours of surplus labour. And just because he has not analysed this relationship, he has not demonstrated (and we have not as yet been concerned with this, for we were dealing with capital as such, and the development of the productive forces was introduced as an extraneous factor) that the development of productive power itself presupposes both the augmentation of capital and that of the simultaneous working days, but that within the given limits of the capital which sets in motion one working day (even if it be one of 50x12 hours, 600 hours) this development is itself the barrier to the development of its productive power.
Wages include not only the worker, but also his reproduction— so that when this specimen of the working class dies, another replaces him; when the 50 workers are dead, there are 50 new ones to replace them. The 50 workers themselves — as living labour capacities — represent not only the costs of their own production, but the costs that had to be paid to their parents over and above their own wages as individuals in order to replace themselves in 50 new individuals. Therefore the population grows even without a rise in wages. Now, why does it not grow quickly enough? Why must it receive a special stimulus? Surely only because it is of no use to capital merely to obtain more "WEALTH" in Ricardo's sense, it wants to command more VALUE, more objectified labour. But, according to him, it can do so in fact only if wages fall, i.e. more living working days are exchanged for the same capital with objectified labour and therefore a greater VALUE is produced. To make wages fall, he presupposes an increase in population. And in order to prove increase in population here, he presupposes that the demand for working days increases, in other words, that capital can buy more objectified labour (objectified in labour capacity), hence that its VALUE has grown. But originally, he proceeded from precisely the opposite assumption, and made the detour only because he started from that assumption. If £1,000 could buy 500 working days and productivity grows, then it can either continue to employ the 500 in the same branch of labour, or split itself up into 2 capitals of 500 and employ 250 in one branch of labour and 250 in another. But it can never command more than 500 working days, for otherwise, according to Ricardo, not only the use values produced by it, but their exchange value must have been multiplied, the objectified labour time over which it has command. Therefore, if one proceeds from Ricardo's assumption, there can be no greater demand for labour. And if there [111-38] is, then the exchange value of capital has grown. Cf.
Malthus on value* who senses the contradictions, but comes a cropper when he himself tries to analyse them.[111]
We have always spoken only of the two elements of capital, of the two parts of the living working day, of which the one represents wages and the other profit, the one necessary labour and the other surplus labour. Where, then, are the two other parts of capital, which are realised in the material and instrument of labour? As regards the simple production process, labour implies the existence of an instrument which facilitates labour and of material in which it represents itself, which it forms. This form gives it its use value. In exchange, this use value becomes exchange value to the extent that it contains objectified labour. But as components of capital, are the material and instrument values which labour must replace?
Thus in the above example(8) (and such objections are frequently made to Ricardo: he considers only profit and wages as components of the production costs, it is said, not machinery and material) it would seem that, if the capital of 100 — splitting itself up into 50 for cotton, 40 for wages, 10 for instrument, and wages of 40 thaler=4 hours of objectified labour — orders a working day of 8 hours, then the worker who would have to reproduce 40 thaler for wages, 40 thaler surplus time (profit), 10 thaler for the instrument, 50 thaler cotton =140 thaler, reproduces only 80 thaler. For 40 thaler [wages] is the product of half a working day, 40 of the other, surplus half. But 60 thaler is the value of the two other components of capital. Since the real product of the worker is 80 thaler, he can reproduce only 80, not 140. Rather, he would have diminished the value of the 60 [instrument and material], since, of the 80, 40 is replacement of his wages; and the remaining 40 surplus labour is smaller than 60 by 20. Instead of a profit of 40, the capitalist would have suffered a loss of 20 on the original part of his capital consisting of instrument and material.
How is the worker to produce another 60 thaler value in addition to the 80, seeing that one-half of his working day, as his wages show, produces only 40 thaler with the instrument and material; the other half only produces the same amount; and he disposes of only one working day, as he cannot work two days in one?
Let us assume that the 50 thaler material=x pounds of cotton yarn; the 10 thaler instrument=the loom. Now, first as regards the use value, it is clear that, if the cotton were not already in the form of yarn and the wood and iron already in that of the loom, the worker could not produce any cloth, any higher use value. For the worker himself in the production process, the 50 thaler and the 10 thaler are nothing more than yarn and loom, not exchange values. His labour has given them a higher use value, and added to them an amount of objectified labour of 80 thaler, namely 40 thaler in which he reproduces his wages and 40 surplus time. The use value — the cloth — contains one working day more, one-half of which, however, replaces only that part of capital in return for which the right to dispose over the labour capacity is exchanged. The worker did not produce the objectified labour time contained in the yarn and loom and constituting part of the value of the product; for him they were and remain material to which he has given a new form and in which he has incorporated new labour. The only condition is that he must not WASTE them, and he has not done so, to the extent that his product has a use value, indeed a higher use value than before. It now contains two parts of objectified labour — his working day, and the labour already present in his material, yarn and loom, independently of him and prior to his labour.
The labour previously objectified was the condition of his labour; it alone made it into labour but cost him no labour. Assume that they [yarn and loom] were not already presupposed as components of capital, as values, and had not cost him anything. Then the value of the product, if he had worked for a whole day, would be 80 thaler, if for half a day, 40 thaler. It would just=an objectified working day. They did not, in fact, cost him anything in production. But that does not cancel out the labour time objectified in them, which remains and only receives another form. If the worker had to produce during the same working day the yarn and loom as well as the cloth, the process would IN FACT be impossible. It is precisely the fact that they do not require his labour either as use values in their original form or as exchange values, but are already present, which makes it possible to create with the addition of a day's labour a product of a value higher than that of a day's labour. But he succeeds in this in so far as he does not have to produce this surplus over and above a day's labour but finds it already available as material, as premiss.
It can therefore only be said that he reproduces these values in so far as they would go to waste, would be useless, without labour; but labour would be equally useless without them. So far as the worker reproduces these values, he does not do so by giving them a higher exchange value or entering into any process with their exchange value, but just by subjecting them to the simple process of production, merely by working. [111-39] But it costs him no more labour time besides that which he requires for their working-up and their higher valorisation. It is a condition under which capital has set him to work. He reproduces the value of material and instrument only by giving them a higher value, and this process of giving them a higher value = his day's labour. In other respects he leaves them as they are. The preservation of their old value derives from the addition of a new one, not from the production or reproduction of the old value itself. In so far as they are products of previous labour, a product of previous labour, i.e. a sum of previously objectified labour, remains an element of his product; the product contains the previous value as well as the new.
In fact, therefore, he produces in this product only the working day which he adds to it, and the preservation of the old value costs him absolutely nothing apart from what it costs him to add the new. For him the old value is only material and remains such, no matter how it changes its form; therefore it is something present independently of his labour. It does not concern him, it concerns capital, that this material which remains, as it only receives another form, itself already contains labour time; it is also independent of his labour and continues on after it as it existed before it. This so-called reproduction does not cost him any labour time but is the condition for his labour time, for it is nothing but the positing of the substance on hand as the material of his labour, relating to it as material.
He therefore replaces the old labour time by the act of labouring itself, not by the application of particular labour time for this purpose. He replaces it simply by the addition of new labour time, whereby the old is preserved in the product and becomes an element of a new product. The worker therefore does not replace with his working day the raw material and instrument, in so far as they are values. The capitalist thus obtains this preservation of the old value just as free of charge as he obtains surplus labour. But he obtains it free of charge [not] because it costs the worker nothing, but because the material and instrument of labour are already in his hands as presupposition and the worker thus cannot work without making the labour already present in objectified form in the hands of capital into the material of his labour, and thereby also conserving the labour objectified in this material. The capitalist, then, pays the worker nothing for the fact that the yarn and the loom — to wit their value — reappears in the cloth, and has thus maintained itself as value. This preservation results simply from the addition of new labour, which adds higher value.
From the original relationship between capital and labour, it therefore emerges that the same service which living labour renders to the objectified labour by means of its relation to it as living, does not cost capital anything, any more than it does the worker, but merely expresses the fact that the material and the instrument of labour confront him as capital, as premisses independent of him. The preservation of the old value is not an act separate from the addition of the new, but occurs of itself; appears as the natural result of it. But the fact that this preservation costs capital nothing, and costs the worker nothing either, is already posited in the relationship of capital and labour, which in itself is already the profit of the one and the wages of the other.
The individual capitalist can imagine (and for his calculation it serves the same purpose) that, if he owns a capital of 100 thaler, 50 thaler cotton, 40 thaler provisions with which to buy labour, 10 thaler instrument; plus a profit of 10% counted on his production costs, then labour has to replace his 50 thaler in respect of raw cotton, 40 thaler provisions, 10 thaler instrument, and 10% of 50, 40 and 10 respectively; so that in his imagination labour creates for him 55 thaler raw material, 44 thaler provisions, 11 thaler instrument, ALTOGETHER=110. But for economists[112] this is a peculiar notion, although asserted with great pomp as an innovation against Ricardo.
If the working day of the worker=10 hours, and he can produce 40 thaler in 8 hours, i.e. produce his wages or, what is the same thing, maintain and replace his labour capacity, he requires [4]/[5] of a day to compensate capital for his wages and gives capital V5 of a day surplus labour or 10 thaler. Capital therefore receives in exchange for the 40 thaler wages, for 8 hours of objectified labour, 10 hours of living labour, and this surplus constitutes its entire profit. The total objectified labour which the worker has created, then, is 50 thaler, and whatever may be the costs of instrument and raw material, he cannot add any more to them, for his day cannot objectify itself in more labour. So now, by the fact that he has added to the 60 thaler raw material and instrument the 50 thaler — 10 hours labour (of which 8 are merely the replacement of his wages)—he has at the same time preserved the material and the instrument — they are preserved just by again coming into contact with living labour and being utilised as instrument and material. This costs him no labour (and he would have no time available for it), nor is he paid for it by the capitalist. Like every natural or social power of labour which is not the product of earlier labour or is not. the product of such earlier labour as must be repeated (e.g. the historical development of the worker, etc.), this animating natural power of labour — namely that while it utilises material and instrument it preserves them in one form or another, and thus preserves also the labour objectified in them, their exchange value — this power becomes the power of capital, not of labour. Hence also not paid for by capital, any more than the worker is paid for his ability to think, etc.
[111-40] We have seen that originally the prerequisite for the appearance of capital is the value which has become independent of and opposed to circulation — i.e. the commodity for which the character of exchange value is not a purely formal, vanishing character facilitating its exchange for other use values and ultimately leading to its disappearance as an object of consumption— money as money, that is money withdrawn from circulation and negatively asserting itself as opposed to it.(9) On the other side, money (in its third, adequate form(10)) — as value which no longer enters circulation as an equivalent, but is not yet potentiated to the level of capital, i.e. negative value independent of and opposed to circulation — again results from the product of capital, in so far as that product is not merely the reproduction of the capital (but this reproduction is purely formal, since of the three parts of the value of capital only one is really consumed, therefore reproduced, that replacing wages; but profit is not reproduction, it is addition of value, surplus value). Just as money first appeared as the prerequisite of capital, as cause of it, so it now appears as its effect. In the first movement, money arose from simple circulation; in the second it arises from the production process of capital. In the first it makes a transition to capital; in the second it appears as a prerequisite of capital posited by capital itself, and is already in itself therefore posited as capital; already contains within itself ideally the relation to capital. [In the second movement] money no longer simply makes a transition to capital, but its potential transformation into capital is already inherent in it as money.
The augmentation of values is therefore the result of the self-valorisation of capital; [regardless of] whether this self-valorisation is the result of absolute surplus time or relative, i.e. of an actual increase of absolute labour time or of an increase in relative surplus labour, i.e. of the diminution of the fractional part of the working day representing necessary labour time for the maintenance of labour capacity, necessary labour in general.
Living labour time reproduces nothing more than the part of the objectified labour time (of capital) which appears as payment for the right to dispose over the living labour capacity, and which, therefore, as an equivalent, must replace the labour time objectified in this labour capacity, i.e. replace the production costs of the living labour capacity, in other words, keep the worker alive as a worker. What it produces in addition to that is not reproduction, but new creation, and indeed new creation of values, because objectification of new labour time in a use value. That the labour time contained in the raw material and instrument is preserved at the same time, is the result not of the quantity of labour, but of its quality of being labour as such; and there is no special payment for this general quality — which does not qualify it as any specifically determined labour, but consists in labour as labour being labour—since capital has purchased this quality in the exchange with the worker.
But the equivalent of this quality (the specific use value of labour) is measured simply by the quantity of labour time which has produced it. To start with, the worker's use of the instrument as instrument and his shaping of the raw material adds to the value of the raw material and instrument as much new form(11) as is=to the labour time contained in his own wages; anything more he adds is surplus labour time, surplus value. But by virtue of the simple relationship, that the instrument is used as an instrument and the raw material is posited as the raw material for labour, by virtue of the simple fact that they are brought into contact with labour, that they are posited as its means and object and thus as objectification of living labour, as moments of labour itself, they are preserved not in their form but in their substance; and, viewed economically, objectified labour time is their substance. The labour time objectified [in raw material and instrument] ceases to exist in a merely one-sided objective form — in which as a mere thing, it is liable to dissolution by chemical processes, etc.— for it is now posited as the material mode of existence, means and object, of living labour.
Out of merely objectified labour time, in whose physical being labour exists only as vanished, external form of its natural substance, a form exterior to this substance itself (e.g. to wood the form of the table, or to iron the form of the cylinder), as merely existing in the external form of the physical matter, develops the indifference of physical matter to its form. Objectified labour time maintains that form not through any living immanent law of reproduction, as e.g. the tree maintains its form as tree (wood maintains itself in a particular form as tree, because this form is a form of wood; whereas the form as table is accidental to wood, not the immanent form of its substance); that form exists only as a form external to the physical matter, or it exists itself only physically. The dissolution to which its matter is subject, therefore dissolves the form as well. But posited as conditions for living labour, the instrument and raw material are themselves reani-mated. Objectified labour is no longer attached to the physical matter as a dead, external, indifferent form, since it is itself, in turn, posited as an element of living labour, as a relation of living labour to itself as objective material, as objectivity of living labour (as means and object) (the objective conditions of living labour).
While living labour by its realisation in the material transforms the material itself, a transformation determined by the purpose of labour, its purposive activity—(a transformation which does not, as in the inanimate object, posit the form as external to the physical matter, as a mere vanishing semblance of its existence) — it preserves the material in a definite form, and subjects the change of form of the physical matter to the purpose of labour. Labour is the living, form-giving fire; it is the transience of things, their temporality, [111-41] as the process of their formation by living time. In the simple production process — leaving aside the valorisation process — the transience of the form of things is used to posit their usefulness.
When raw cotton becomes yarn, the yarn becomes fabric, the fabric becomes printed or dyed fabric, etc., and this, say, becomes a dress, (1) the substance of the cotton has been preserved in all these forms. (In the chemical process, the reactions regulated by labour have throughout consisted in an exchange of (natural) equivalents, etc.); (2) in all these successive processes, the substance has obtained a more useful form, one making it more suitable for consumption, until it has finally obtained the form in which it can be direct object of consumption; in which, therefore, the consumption of the substance and the transcendence of its form constitutes human satisfaction, and its transformation is its use. The substance of raw cotton is preserved in all these processes; it perishes in one form of use value in order to make way for a higher one, until the object is in being as the object of direct consumption.
But when the raw cotton is converted into twist, it is posited in a definite relation to a further type of labour. If this labour did not take place, not only has the form been imposed on it uselessly, i.e. the earlier labour is not endorsed by the new, the substance is also spoilt, for it has use value in the form of twist only if it is worked on further: it is use value only in respect of the use which further labour makes of it; it is use value only if its form as twist is transcended into that of cloth, whereas the raw cotton in its being as raw cotton is capable of an infinite number of useful applications.
Thus, without further labour, the use value of raw cotton and twist, material and form, would be wrecked; it would be destroyed, instead of being produced. The material as well as the form, substance like the form, are preserved by further labour— preserved as use values, until they assume the form of use value as such, whose use is consumption. It is therefore inherent in the simple production process that the earlier stage of production is preserved by the later, and that the creation of a higher use value preserves the old, or transforms it only in so far as it is raised as use value. It is living labour which preserves the use value of the un-finished product of labour by making it into the material of further labour. But it only preserves it, i.e. only protects it from uselessness and decay, by working on it in accordance with its purpose, by making it, in general, the object of new living labour.
This preservation of the old use value is not a process taking place alongside the augmentation of the old use value or its completion by new labour; it is the result of this new labour of raising the use value itself. When the work of weaving transforms twist into cloth, i.e. treats it as the raw material of weaving — a particular kind of living labour—(and the twist has use value only if it is woven into fabric), it preserves the use value which the raw cotton as such possessed and that which it obtained specifically as twist. It preserves the product of [earlier] labour by making it into the raw material of new labour. But it does not (1) add new labour and (2) besides that preserve the use value of the raw material by means of another labour. It preserves the utility of the raw cotton as yarn by weaving the yarn into fabric. (All this belongs already to the first chapter, on production in general.) Preserves it by weaving it. This preservation of labour as a product, or of the use value of the product of labour, by its becoming the raw material for new labour, by again being posited as material objectivity of purposive living labour, is given in the simple production process. In relation to use value, labour possesses the property that it preserves the existing use value by raising it to a higher one, and raises it by making it the object of a new labour determined by a final aim; by transforming it again from the form of indifferent consistency into that of the objective material of labour, of the body of labour.
(The same is true of the instrument. A spindle preserves itself as use value only when it is used for spinning. Otherwise, the particular form imparted here to the iron and wood would make unusable both the labour which produced that form and the material in which it produced it. Only if it is posited as the means of living labour, as an objective moment of being of its living existence, only then are the use value of the wood and iron, as well as their form, preserved. To be used up is the specific role of the spindle as an instrument of labour, but to be used up in the process of spinning. The greater productivity which it confers on labour creates more use values and thereby replaces the use value used up in the consumption of the instrument. This appears most clearly in agriculture, since here [the product] as an immediate means of life and use value appears most readily, because earliest historically, as use value in distinction to exchange value. If, by using a hoe, the cultivator produces twice as much grain as he could otherwise produce, he needs to use less time on the production of the hoe itself; he has enough food [for the time required] to make a new hoe.)
Now in the process of valorisation, the value components of capital — one existing in the form of material, the other in the form of instrument — do not appear as values in respect of the worker, i.e. of living labour (for the worker exists only as such in this process), but as simple moments of the production process; as use values for labour, as the objective conditions for its taking place, or as its objective moments. That the worker preserves them when he uses the instrument as instrument and gives to the raw material [111-42] a higher form of use value, is inherent in the nature of labour itself. But the use values of labour thus preserved are, as components of capital, exchange values. As such they are determined by the production costs contained in them, the amount of labour objectified in them. (For use value, only the quality of the labour already objectified is relevant.) The amount of objectified labour is preserved by the preservation of its quality as use values for further labour through contact with living labour.
The use value of raw cotton, like its use value as yarn, is preserved by the cotton — as yarn — being woven into fabric, by its existing as one of the objective moments (along with the loom) in weaving. The amount of labour time contained in the raw cotton and the yarn is thereby also preserved. What appears in the simple production process as the preservation of the quality of previous labour—and consequently also of the material in which it is embodied — appears in the process of valorisation as the preservation of the amount of labour already objectified. For capital, this preservation is the preservation of the amount of objectified labour through the production process; for living labour itself, it is only the preservation of the already present use value, present for labour to use.
Living labour adds a new amount of labour; but it is not by virtue of this quantitative addition that it preserves the quantity of labour already objectified, but by virtue of its quality as living labour, or by relating itself as labour to the use values in which the previous labour exists. Living labour, however, is not paid for this quality it possesses as living labour — it would not be bought at all, were it not living labour — but for the quantity of labour contained in it. What is paid for is only the price of its use value, as is the case with all other commodities. The specific quality it possesses, its ability by adding a new amount of labour to the amount previously objectified to preserve the objectified labour in its quality as objectified labour, is not paid for, nor does it cost the worker anything, since it is the natural property of his labour capacity.
In the production process, the separation of labour from the objective moments of its existence — instrument and material — is transcended. The existence of capital and wage labour rests on this separation. The transcendence of the separation, which really takes place in the production process—for otherwise no work could be carried on at all—is not paid for by capital. (The transcendence is effected not by the exchange with the worker, but by labour itself in the production process. But as such ongoing labour, it is itself already incorporated into capital, is one of its moments. This preserving power of labour therefore appears as the self-preserving power of capital. The worker has only added new labour; previous labour — by virtue of the existence of capital — has eternal existence as value, completely independent of its physical form of being. This is how the matter appears to capital and to the worker.) If capital also had to pay for the transcendence, it would simply cease to be capital. For this is simply part of the physical role which labour plays in the production process by virtue of its nature; part of its use value.
But as use value, labour belongs to the capitalist; as merely exchange value, it belongs to the worker. Its living quality in the production process itself, its quality of preserving objectified labour time by making it into the objective mode of being of living labour, is not the worker's concern. This appropriation, by which living labour transforms the instrument and material in the production process itself into the body of its soul, and thereby raises them from the dead, is indeed an antithesis to the fact that labour is without an object or is a reality in the worker only as immediately living labour — and that the material and instrument of labour exist in capital as beings-for-themselves. (To this we must return.)
The valorisation process of capital is carried on through and in the simple production process by putting living labour in its natural relation to its material elements of being. But in so far as living labour enters into this relation, this relation does not exist for labour itself but for capital; it is itself already an element of capital.
It is evident, then, that the capitalist, by means of the process of exchange with the worker — by actually paying the worker an equivalent for the production costs contained in his labour capacity, i.e. by giving him the means to preserve his labour capacity but appropriating living labour for himself — obtains two things free of charge: firstly, the surplus labour which increases the value of his capital, but at the same time, secondly, the quality of living labour which preserves the previous labour materialised in the component parts of capital and thus preserves the previously existing value of the capital. Yet this preservation is not due to living labour increasing the amount of objectified labour and thus creating value, but simply to the fact that in adding a new quantity of labour it exists as living labour, in the immanent relationship to the material and instrument of labour posited by the production process; i.e. it is due to its quality as living labour. But as this quality, living labour is itself a moment of the simple production process, and the capitalist does not have to pay for it, just as the yarn and the loom do not cost him anything over and above their price for being likewise moments of the production process.
If, e.g. in time of STAGNATION OF TRADE, etc., the MILLS are shut down, then it can indeed be seen that the machinery rusts and the yarn is useless ballast, and rots, as soon as their relation to living labour ceases. If the capitalist merely [111-43] orders work so as to produce surplus value — to produce value not yet existing — it can be seen that as soon as he ceases to order work, his already existing capital, too, is depreciated; i.e. that living labour not merely adds new value, but by the VERY ACT OF ADDING A NEW VALUE TO
THE OLD ONE, MAINTAINS, ETERNALISES IT.
(This shows clearly the stupidity of the accusation levelled against Ricardo, that he conceives only of profit and wages as necessary components of production costs, and not also of the part of capital contained in the raw material and instrument. In so far as the value existing in them is merely preserved, no new production costs are incurred. But as far as these existing values themselves are concerned, they all dissolve themselves once more into objectified labour — necessary labour and surplus labour— wages and profit. The purely natural material, in so far as no human labour is objectified in it, in so far as it is thus merely matter, exists independently of human labour, has no value, since value is only objectified labour; any more than the basic elements in general have any value.)
The preservation of the existing capital by the labour which valorises it, thus costs capital nothing, and therefore does not belong to the production costs, although the existing values are preserved in the product, and in exchange, therefore, equivalents must be given for them. But the preservation of these values in the product costs capital nothing, so capital cannot rank it among the production costs. Nor are they replaced by labour, since they are not consumed, except in so far as they are consumed in an aspect of their mode of being which is indifferent to labour and exists outside it, i.e. in so far as their transience is consumed (transcended) through labour. Only wages are really consumed.
[ Surplus Value and Profit]
Let us return once more to our example(1): 100 thaler capital, i.e. 50 thaler raw material, 40 thaler labour, 10 thaler instrument of production. The worker needs 4 hours to produce the 40 thaler, the means required for his subsistence, or the part of production necessary for his maintenance; let his working day be 8 hours. The capitalist then obtains a surplus of 4 hours free of charge; his surplus value equals 4 objectified hours, 40 thaler; therefore his product=50+10 (the values preserved, not reproduced; values which have remained constant, unaltered, as values)+40 thaler (wages, reproduced because consumed in the form of wages)+40 thaler surplus value. Sum total: 140 thaler.
Of these 140 thaler, 40 are now surplus. Now, the capitalist must live during production and before he begins to produce; say, 20 thaler. He must have these 20 thaler apart from his capital of 100 thaler; equivalents for them must therefore be present in circulation. (How these originate does not concern us here.) Capital presupposes circulation as a constant magnitude. These equivalents are present once again. He therefore consumes 20 thaler of his profit. These enter into simple circulation. The 100 thaler also enter into simple circulation, but only to be transformed again into conditions of new production: 50 thaler raw material, 40 subsistence for worker, 10 instrument. Remains a surplus value added as such, newly produced, of 20 thaler. This is money, value made negatively independent in opposition to circulation. It cannot enter into circulation as simple equivalent, for the exchange of objects of simple consumption, since circulation is presupposed as constant. But the independent illusory existence of money has been transcended; it exists now only to valorise itself, i.e. to become capital.
In order to do so, however, it would have to be exchanged once more for the moments of the production process: subsistence for the worker, raw material and instrument. These are all reducible to objectified labour; can only be posited by living labour. Money, so far as it already exists in itself as capital, is thus merely a draft on future (new) labour. In objective form it exists only as money. The surplus value, the increase of objectified labour, so far as it exists for itself, is money; but money is now in itself already capital, and as such a draft on new labour. Here capital no longer enters into relation only with existing labour but with future labour as well. Nor does it any longer appear dissolved into its simple elements in the production process, but dissolved into these as money; but no longer as money which is merely the abstract form of general wealth, but as money which is a draft on the real possibility of general wealth — on labour capacity, and, more precisely, on labour capacity coming into being. As such a draft, its material existence as money is of no consequence and can be replaced by any other title. Just like the State creditor, every capitalist possesses in his newly acquired value a draft on future labour, and has already appropriated future labour by the very appropriation of current labour. (This aspect of capital to be developed later. It already reveals here its characteristic feature: that as value it exists separately from its substance. This already contains the basis of credit.) The accumulation of capital in the form of money is therefore in no way a material accumulation of the material conditions of labour, but the accumulation of property titles to labour. It posits future labour as wage labour, as use value of capital. No equivalent exists for the newly created value; its possibility [exists] only in new [111-44] labour.
In this example, then, by means of absolute surplus labour time — labour of 8 hours instead of 4 — a new value of 20 thaler money is produced, and this is money already related to its form as capital (money already as posited possibility of capital, not, as earlier, when this possibility arose only as the result of money ceasing to be money as such). This new value is added to the old values, to the existing world of wealth.
Now, if productivity doubles, so that the worker needs to put in only 2 hours' necessary labour instead of 4, and the capitalist CONSEQUENTLY makes him work 8 hours as before, then the account is as follows: 50 thaler material, 20 wages, 10 instrument of labour, 60 surplus value (6 hours, previously 4). Increment of absolute surplus value: 2 hours or 20 thaler. Sum total: 140 thaler (in the product).
A sum of 140 thaler as before, but 60 of it is surplus value, and of that 60, 40 as before is accounted for by the absolute increase of surplus time [beyond the necessary labour time], 20 by its relative increase. But the simple exchange value contains only 140 thaler, as before. Now [that productivity has doubled] is it only the use values which have increased, or has a new value been created? Previously, capital had to recommence the process with 100 thaler in order to expand anew by 40%. What becomes of the 20 [relative] surplus value? Previously, capital consumed 20; it was left with a value of 20. Now it consumes 20, and is left with 40. On the other hand, the capital entering into production previously remained 100; now it has become 80. What has been gained on one side as value in one form, has been lost on the other as value in the other form.
The previous capital re-enters the production process, and again produces 20 surplus value (after its consumption has been deducted). At the end of this second operation newly created value exists for which there is no equivalent: 20 thaler together with the first 40. Let us now take the second capital [whose productivity is twice as high]. 50 material, 20 wages ( = 2 hours), 10 instrument of labour. But with the 2 hours [spent on wages], it produces a value of 8, namely 80 thaler (of which 20 are for production costs [wages]). 60 thaler are left over, since only 20 reproduce wages (therefore vanish as wages). [If the second capital re-enters the production process, at the end of this second operation it will have produced, together with the first 60 thaler, a surplus value of] 60+60=120. At the end of this second operation, 20 thaler for consumption, remainder 20(2) surplus value; together with the first 60.
In the third operation with the first [capital], 60 [surplus value], with the second, 80; with the fourth [operation] with the first [capital], 80, with the second [capital], 100. The first capital has increased as value by as much as its exchange value as productive capital has diminished.(3)
Suppose that both capitals together with their surplus can be used as capital, i.e. the surplus can be exchanged for new living labour. We then get the following account (omitting the [capitalist's own] consumption): the first capital produces [at a rate of profit of] 40%; the second 60%. 40% of 140 is 56; 60% of 140 (i.e. 80 capital, 60 surplus value) is 84. The total product in the first instance [if surplus value is used productively] is 140+56=196; in the second, 140 + 84=224. In the second instance, the absolute exchange value [of the product] is thus 28 thaler greater.
The first capital has 40 thaler to purchase new labour time; the value of one working hour was assumed to be 10 thaler, so it buys another 4 working hours with the 40 thaler which produce for it 80 (of which 40 for replacement of wages) (i.e. give it 8 hours' labour time).[113] The first capital was at the end [of the production process] 140 + 80 (namely, reproduction of the capital of 100; surplus value 40 or reproduction of 140; the first 100 thaler [of advanced capital] reproduce themselves as 140; the second 40 (since they are spent only on the purchase of new labour, hence do not simply replace a value — incidentally, an impossible assumption) produce 80). 140+80 = 220.
The second capital [on completion of the first production cycle equals] 140; the 80 produce 40; or the 80 thaler reproduce themselves as 120. But the remaining 60 [surplus value added to capital] (as they are spent only on the purchase of labour, and are therefore not used for the simple replacement of value but reproduce themselves from themselves and posit the surplus) reproduce themselves as 180; therefore 120+120 = 240 (40 thaler more produced than by the first capital, a surplus time of 2 hours, for the first is a surplus time of 2 hours as assumed also in the first capital). Therefore a greater exchange value as a result because more labour objectified, 2 hours more surplus labour.
[111-45] Something else to be noted here as well: 140 thaler at 40% yield 56; capital and interest[3] together= 140 + 56=196. Butin our calculations we have obtained [for the first capital] 220, according to which the interest on 140 would not be 56 but 84, which would be 60% on 140. (140:84= 100:x; x=8400/i[40]=60). Likewise in the second instance: 140 at 60%=84; capital and interest together= 140 + 84=224. But we obtain [for the second capital] 240; according to which the interest on 140 is not 84 but 100 (140+100=240); i.e. % (140:100=100:x; x = 10000/[140]) 7l[3]/[7]%.
How does this come about? (In the first instance 60% instead of 40%; in the second instance 7l [3]/ [7]% instead of 60%). In the first instance, where it was 60 instead of 40, 20% too much came out; in the second 7l [3]/ [7] instead of 60, i.e. ll [3]/ [7]% too much. Why, firstly, the difference in both cases, and secondly, the difference in each case?
In the first case the original capital of 100=60 (material and instrument of labour) and 40 labour, i.e. [3]/[5] material [and instrument], [2]/[5] labour. The first [3]/[5] yields no interest at all; the latter [2]/[5] yields 100% interest. But computed on the basis of the whole capital, the capital has increased by only 40%; [2]/[5] of 100=40. But 100% on 40 yields only 40% on the whole 100, i.e. growth of the whole capital by [2]/[5]. Now, if, similarly, only [2]/[5] of the newly added capital of 40 had increased by 100%, the total would have increased by 16. 40+16=56. This added to the 140=196, which is in fact an addition of 40% to the 156, if capital and interest are taken together.
40 [the newly added capital] has grown by 100%, has doubled, is 80; an expansion of [2]/[5] of 40 by 100% adds 16. 40 of the 80 replaces the capital [spent on wages]. 40 is profit.
The account then is [for the first case]:
100 C(4)+40 interest(5)+40 C+40 interest=220; or capital of 140 with interest of 80; but had we calculated it as:
100 C+40 interest+40 C+16 interest=196; or capital of 140 with interest of 56.
[In our initial calculation,] we added too much in interest; the extra interest on 40 thaler of capital is 24 thaler. But 24=[3]/[5] of 40 (3x8 = 24); i.e. alongside the capital [of 100 thaler] a mere [2]/[5] of the [newly added] capital [of 40 thaler] has grown by 100%, so the total [newly added] capital has grown by only [2]/[5], i.e. 16 thaler.
The interest we calculated for the 40 thaler was 24 thaler too high (this 24 represents 100% increase of [3]/[5] of the capital of 40); 24 on 24 is 100% on 3x8 (7[5] of 40). But on the whole sum of 140, it is 60% [extra profit] instead of [the initial] 40%, i.e. on 40 thaler 24 too much has been calculated ([3]/[5]), 24 on 40 is 60%. On the capital of 40, therefore, 60% too much has been calculated (60=[3]/[5] of 100). But on the total capital of 140, 24 too much has been calculated (and this is the difference between 220 and 196), thus together 28 73% too much.[114] Hence on the total [capital of 140 thaler], not 60% too much [has been calculated], as on the 40 [thaler] capital, but only 28 7[3] too much; which makes a difference of 31 7ä%, depending on whether we calculate 24 too much on the 40 [thaler] of the capital of 140.
Similarly in the other example.[115]
Of the 80 thaler advanced, which produces a value of 120, 50+10 [expended on the raw material and instrument] was merely replaced; but the 20 [expended on wages] reproduced itself three-fold, 60 (20 reproduction, 40 surplus). If 20 thaler [expended on wages] produces 60 thaler, i.e. three times its value, then 60 thaler [of newly expended capital] produces [a surplus value of] 180.
[IV-l](6) We need not concern ourselves any longer with this most tedious calculation. The point is simply this: if, as in our first example, material and instrument amount to [3]/s [of the advanced capital] (60 out of 100), wages [2]/[5] (40) and the capital yields 40% profit, then it equals 140 at the conclusion [of the production process] (this 40% profit is equivalent to the capitalist ordering 12 hours' labour when the necessary labour time is 6 hours, thus gaining 100% of the necessary labour time). Now, if the 40 thaler profit were employed once more as capital under the same assumptions — and at the point we have reached, the assumptions have not altered — then [3]/[5] of the 40 thaler, i.e. 24 thaler, must again be expended on the material and instrument, and [2]/[5] on labour. So only the wages of 16 are doubled, becoming 32, of which 16 are for reproduction of the wages and 16 are surplus labour; at the end of the process of production the profit is therefore 40+16, ALTOGETHER=56 or 40%. Thus the total capital of 140 would have produced 196. under the same conditions. It is not permissible to assume, as most political economists do, that the 40 thaler are spent wholly on wages, to buy living labour, and thus at the conclusion of the process of production yield 80 thaler.
If it is said: a capital of 100 yields 10% in a certain period, 5% in another, nothing could be more mistaken than to conclude, as do Careyb and his associates,"[6] that in the first case the share of capital in the output was Vio, therefore that of labour only [9]/[10]; and that in the second case the share of capital was only l/[2]o, therefore that of labour was [19]/20; to conclude, in other words, that because the rate of profit falls, the share of labour rises. Of course, from the standpoint of capital, which has no awareness of the nature of its valorisation process, and has an interest in having one only at times of crises, the profit of 10% on a capital of 100 looks like a flat increase of 10% on each of the value components of the capital — material, instrument, wages — as though the capital as a sum of 100 thaler value, as that number of a certain unit of values, has increased by 10%.
But in fact the question is: (1) how did the components of capital relate to each other, and (2) how much surplus labour did it buy with the wages — with the hours of labour objectified in the wages? If I know the total sum of capital, the relationship of its value components to each other (in practice I should also have to know what fractional part of the instrument of production is used up in the process, therefore actually enters into the process), and if I know the profit, I know how much surplus labour has been produced.
If [3]/[5] of the capital consisted of material [and instrument of production], therefore 60 thaler (for the sake of convenience we assume that all the material [and the instrument] is consumed productively), and [[2]/[5]] of wages, 40, and if the profit on the 100 thaler is 10, then the labour bought with the 40 thaler of objectified labour time has produced 50 thaler of objectified labour in the production process. It has therefore worked a surplus time or produced a surplus value of 25% = 74 of the necessary labour time. If, therefore, the worker works a 12-hour day, he has worked 3 hours of surplus time, and the labour time necessary to obtain his subsistence for one day was 9 hours' labour.[3]
The new value produced in production is indeed only 10 thaler, but according to the real rate these 10 thaler are to be taken as a percentage of the 40, not of the 100. The 60 thaler value has created no new value, only the working day has. The worker has therefore increased the capital exchanged for his labour capacity by 25%, not by 10%. The total capital has been increased by 10%. 10 is 25% of 40; it is only 10% of 100. The rate of profit of capital therefore by no means expresses the rate at which living labour increases objectified labour; for this increase is simply=to the surplus with which the worker reproduces his wages, i.e.=the time which he works over and above that which he would have to work to produce his wages.
If in the above example the worker were not a [wage] worker set to work by the capitalist, and if he treated the use values contained in the 100 thaler not as capital, but merely as objective conditions of his labour, he would possess, before starting on the production process anew, 40 thaler subsistence (which he would consume during the working day) and 60 thaler instrument and material. He would work only [3]/[4] of a day, 9 hours, and his product at the end of the day would not be 110 thaler but 100, which he would then exchange [for the objective conditions of his labour] in the above proportions and recommence the process again and again. But on the other hand he would work 3 hours less, i.e. save the 25% surplus labour=25% surplus value on the exchange he would have made between 40 thaler subsistence and his labour time. And if on some occasion he worked 3 hours extra, because he had extra material to hand and also the instrument, it would not occur to him to argue that he had made an additional gain of 10%, but one of 25%; because he could buy 7[4] more means of subsistence, for 50 thaler instead of for 40, and the means of subsistence alone would have value to him, since he is concerned with use value.
This illusion that the new gain is not [IV-2] produced by the exchange of the 9 hours of labour objectified in the 40 thaler for 12 hours of living labour, thus producing a surplus value of 25% on this portion, but that the total capital has grown over the board by an even 10%—10% of 60 [constant capital] is 6 and of 40 [variable capital] is 4; this illusion is the basis of compound interest calculation made by the notorious Dr. Price,[3] which prompted the HEAVEN-BORN Pitt to commit the folly of his SINKING FUND}(7) The identity of surplus gain [Mehrgewinn] with surplus labour time — absolute and relative — sets a qualitative limit[118] to the accumulation of capital, the working day (the time during which the worker's labour capacity can be active within any given 24 hours), the degree of development of productive power, and the size of the population, which represents the sum of simultaneous working days, etc. If, on the contrary, surplus gain is conceived of merely as interest — i.e. as the rate at which capital grows by means of some imaginary SLEIGHT OF HAND — the limit [to the accumulation of capital] would only be quantitative. Then it would be absolutely incomprehensible why capital should not add the accrued interest to itself as capital every other morning, and so create interest on its interest in endless geometric progression. Experience has shown the economists the impossibility of the Priceian augmentation of interest, but they have never revealed the BLUNDER contained in it.
Of the 110 thaler which come out at the end of the process of production, 60 thaler (material and instrument), so far as they are values, have remained absolutely unaltered. The worker has taken nothing from them nor added anything to them. Although he maintains objectified labour for capital free of charge, by the VERY FACT OF HIS LABOUR BEING LIVING LABOUR, it nevertheless seems, from the capitalist's standpoint, that the worker must pay him even for the capitalist's permission to enter as labour into the adequate relation to the objectified elements, the objective conditions [of labour]. Now as regards the remaining 50 thaler, 40 thaler of them represent not mere preservation but real reproduction, since capital has divested itself of them in the form of wages and the worker has consumed them. 10 thaler represent the production over and above the reproduction, namely l/[4] surplus labour (of 3 hours).
The product of the production process is only these 50 thaler. Hence if the worker, as is wrongly maintained, snared the product [of the newly added labour] with the capitalist [at a rate of profit of 10%] in such a way as to obtain [9]/[10] of it, he would have to get not 40 thaler which is only [8]/[10] [of the newly added labour] (and he has received it in advance and reproduced it in return; in fact, he has fully repaid it to capital and has, moreover, maintained the already existing value for it free of charge), but 45 thaler, leaving capital only 5. Therefore the capitalist would only possess 65 thaler at the end as the product of the production process which he began with 100 thaler.
But the worker gets none of the reproduced 40 thaler, nor any of the 10 thaler surplus value. If the reproduced 40 thaler should be conceived of as destined to serve once more as wages, therefore to be used by capital for a new purchase of living labour, one can only say, as far as the ratio is concerned, that the objectified labour of 9 hours (40 thaler) purchases a living [labour] of 12 hours (50 thaler), and thus produces a surplus value of 25% of the real product of the valorisation process (partly reproduced as wage fund, partly newly produced as surplus value).
Just now the original capital was 100:
Conditions of labour Instrument Wage labour 50 10 40
Produced a surplus gain of 10 thaler (25% surplus time). Altogether 110 thaler.
Suppose that it has now become:
Let the result be 110 thaler. The commonplace economist, and the even more commonplace capitalist, will argue that [the profit of] 10% has been produced in equal proportions by all parts of the capital. Once again 80 thaler of the capital would merely have been preserved; no change in its value would have taken place. The 20 thaler would have been exchanged for 30, that is all; therefore the surplus labour would have increased to 50% [of necessary labour time] from the previous 25%.
Take the third case:
[Capital] [Conditions of [Instrument] [Wage labour] labour] 100 70 20 10
Result 110. In this case, the unchanging value [is] 90. The new product 20; therefore surplus value or surplus time 100%.
We thus have three cases in which the profit on the whole capital is 10 in each case; but in the first case, the new [surplus] value produced equals 25% of the objectified labour expended in the purchase of the living labour, in the second case 50%, in the third 100%.(8)
The devil take these damned wrong calculations. But NEVER MIND. Commençons de nouveau}[3]
In the first case we had:
Unchanging value Wage labour Surplus value Total 60 40 10 110
We assume throughout the working day =12 hours. (We could also assume it as growing, e.g. that it was previously only x hours but is now x + b hours, and productive power as remaining the same; or assume both factors as varying.)
Hours Thaler [IV-3] The worker produces in 12 50 so in 1 4[1]/& soin 9 [3]/ [5] 401 In 12
f hours, soin 2 [2]/ (9) 10J50 thaler.
The worker's necessary labour amounts therefore to 9[3]/[5] hours (40 thaler); the surplus labour thus to 2[2]/s hours ([produces] value of 10 thaler). 2[2]/[5] hours is a fifth of the working day. The surplus labour of the worker amounts to l/[5] of a day, therefore = the value of 10 thaler. Let us now consider these 2[2]/[5] hours as a percentage which capital has gained on the labour time objectified in 9[3]/[5] hours in exchange for living labour, 2[2]/[5]:9[3]/[5] = i2/[5]:[48]/[5], i.e. 12:48=1:4. Hence [2[2]/[5] hours = ] l/[4] of the capital [advanced for wages] = 25% on it. Similarly 10 thaler : 40 thaler=l : 4 = 25%. If we now summarise the whole result:
No. I
Original Unchang-Value re-Surplus Total capital ing val-produced value s u m u e for wages of production
100 tlr. 60 tlr. 40 tlr. lOtlr. 110 tlr.
Surplus % [of sur-time plus time] and sur-to the ex-plus changed ob-value jectified
or 10 tlr. 25%
(One could say that the instrument of labour, i.e. its value, must be reproduced, not merely replaced, since it is in fact used up, is consumed in production. This is to be considered under capital fixe. In fact, the value of the instrument passes over into that of the material; in so far as it is objectified labour, it alters only its form. If in the above example the value of the material was 50 and that of the instrument of labour 10, so now, where 5 of the instrument's value is used up, that of the material [together with that of the used-up part of the instrument] is 55 and that of the instrument 5. If it is completely used up, the value of the material [together with that of the used-up instrument] has gone up to 60. This is an element of the simple production process. The instrument has not, like wages, been consumed outside the production process.)
We come now to the second case assumed:
Original capital
Unchanging value
Value reproduced for
Surplus value of production
Total
sum Therefore:
No. II
Original Unchang-Value re-Surplus capital ing val-produced value ue for wages of production
100 80 20 10 tlr. 8 hours
In the first case as in the second, the profit on the total capital 100=10%; but in the first case the real surplus value which capital obtains in the production process is 25%, in the second 50%.
The assumptions in No. II are in themselves quite as plausible as those in No. I. But related to each other, those in No. II appear to be absurd. The material and the instrument have been raised in value from 60 to 80 thaler, the productivity of labour has fallen from 4l/[6] thaler [newly created value] per hour to 2[2]/[4] thaler, and [the rate of] surplus value has increased by 100%. (But if we assume that the greater outlay for wages in the first case represents more working days, in the second fewer, then the assumption is correct.)
The fact that the necessary wages, therefore the value of labour expressed in thaler, have fallen, would in itself be of no consequence. Whether the value of one hour's labour is expressed in 2 or 4 thaler, both in the first case as well as in the second the product of 12 hours' labour exchanges (in circulation) for 12 hours' labour, and in both cases the surplus labour appears as surplus value. The absurdity of the assumption [in No. II] arises from the fact that (1) we have presupposed the maximum of labour time as 12 hours; hence cannot bring in more or fewer working days; (2) the more we allow capital to grow on one side [that of constant value], the more we cause not only the necessary labour time to diminish but its value as well; although the value is the same. In the second case the price would actually have to rise. The fact that the worker can live with less labour, i.e. produce more in the same number of hours, would have to make itself evident not in the [IV-4] decline in [the number of] thaler [paid] for one necessary working hour, but in the number of the necessary working hours itself.
If, e.g. as in the first example, he obtained 476x9[3]/5 thaler, but the use value of this value, which must be constant in order to express value (not price), had so increased that he no longer required (as in the first case) 9[3]/[5] but only 4 hours for the
Total Surplus % on sum time and [varia-surplus ble] capi-value 4 hrs.
tal
110 10 tlr. 50%
Endnotes
[69] The proposition that the natural content of the exchange process originally "is completely distinct from the economic relationship, because it still directly coincides with it" was developed further in Marx's A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Marx says there that under the conditions of direct barter, the earliest form of exchange, "exchange value does not acquire an independent form, but is still directly tied to use value". At this stage, use values form the content of wealth, a content which is "indifferent" to its social form. "Use value in this indifference to the determined economic form lies outside the sphere of investigation of political economy" (see present edition, Vol. 29).—173
[72] "Self-reflection" is a Hegelian term denoting the reflection of a conceptual determination back into itself.—176
[73] One of the four parts of the Corpus iuris civilis, a code of Roman civil law compiled under the Byzantine Emperor Justinian between 529 and 534. The four parts are: a collection of legal decrees, a collection of pronouncements by Roman lawyers (Digesta or Pandectae), a rambling survey of law (Institutiones), and a collection of additional constitutional acts (Novellae). Marx refers to the 1815 stereotyped edition of the Institutiones.—177
[74] Marx means such opponents of Bastiat as Proudhon and the Proudhonist Chevé. In 1849 and 1850, the two polemised against Bastiat in seven letters published in a pamphlet entitled Gratuité du crédit. Discussion entre M. Fr. Bastiat et M. Proudhon, Paris, 1850, which also contained seven letters by Bastiat written in reply.—181
[75] Marx means the page number in his 1846 notebook of excerpts entitled Geschichte der Nationalökonomie; b indicates the column.—190
[76] The page number refers to the 1844 notebook of excerpts.—192
[78] J. B. Say's theory of utility, set forth in his Traité d'économie politique, was a vulgarisation of Adam Smith's labour theory of value. By reducing value to use value and equating the latter with utility, Say sought to prove that utility resulted from the harmonious interaction of human industry, nature and capital.—198
[80] In an excerpt notebook compiled in Brussels approximately in March and April 1845 and containing passages from Storch's Cours d'économie politique, Vol. I, Paris, 1823, Marx has the following summary of a passage occurring on p. 154
[81] of Storch's book: "Human industry is only productive if it produces a value sufficient to replace the production costs ... actually, that reproduction is not enough: it ought to produce a certain value over and above that".—201
[82] 81 Marx means Storch's assertion that "non-material labour"—the labour of doctors, teachers, artists and the like — is productive (Cours d'économie politique), and Senior's attributing of productivity to all functions useful to the bourgeoisie and the bourgeois state (Principes fondamentaux de l'économie politique, Paris, 1836). This theory, like many others, differed from the views of Adam Smith who, albeit inconsistently, distinguished between productive labour, i.e. labour creating surplus value, and all other kinds of labour, unproductive from the standpoint of bourgeois relations. Marx gave a detailed analysis of Smith's views on productive and unproductive labour and a critique of the relevant theories of Storch, Senior and others in his manuscripts of 1861-63 (see present edition, Vol. 31).—203 82 Marx gave a broad analysis of productive and unproductive labour later, in his manuscripts of 1861-63 (see present edition, vols. 31 and 34).—204
[83] Marx discusses Wakefield's theory of colonisation in detail in Capital, Vol. I, Ch. XXXIII. In conclusion he points out that this theory confirms the laws governing the rise and development of capitalist production. "...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" (see present edition, Vol. 35).—208
[84] Market reports on the listed commodities were published regularly in The Economist in 1850-57. Quotations from the journal in Marx's notebooks of excerpts and his frequent references to The Economist in his newspaper articles show that he followed these reports regularly.—211
[85] Here Marx has "Arbeitsvermögen" (labour capacity). In his manuscripts of 1857-58 he as a rule uses this term in place of "Arbeitskraft" (labour power), which occurs once in his earlier economic work, Wage Labour and Capital (see present edition, Vol. 9, p. 214) and several times in his manuscripts of 1861-63. In Volume I of Capital he treats the two terms as identical: "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" (see present edition, Vol. 35).— 212
[86] Linguet's views are discussed in the manuscripts of 1861-63 (see present edition, Vol. 31).—218
[87] The text beginning on page 8 of Notebook III is the continuation of the text of Notebook II. The beginning of the sentence opening page 8 was on page 29 — which has not reached us — of Notebook II and was reconstructed, together with the continuation, on the basis of the economic manuscripts of 1861-63. The first seven pages of Notebook III contain an unfinished critique of Bastiat and Carey, written several months earlier (see this volume, pp. 5-16).—219
[88] Britain's working class had fought for a legal limitation of the working day to ten hours from the late 18th century, the struggle assuming a mass character in the 1830s. The Ten Hours' Bill, passed by Parliament on June 8, 1847, applied only to women and "young persons". Marx discusses the British workers' struggle for a normal working day in detail in Capital, Vol. I, Ch. X (see present edition, Vol. 35).—220, 361
[89] Existing for itself may be an allusion to the Hegelian term "Fürsichsein", which denotes the condition of an attribute regarded in its fixity or relative self-containment.—228
[90] This refers to the British Owenites John Francis Bray, John Gray, Thomas Hodgskin, William Thompson and others who drew socialist conclusions from Ricardo's theory (see Note 32). Marx discussed their views in the manuscripts of 1861-63, in connection with the pamphlet Labour Defended against the Claims of Capital (London, 1825), published anonymously by Thomas Hodgskin. He examined the tendency, common to all these socialists, to regard capital not as a social relation but as a sum of objects and explain the misery of the working people by the estranged form in which these objects appear in the hands of the capitalists (see present edition, Vol. 32).—229, 436
[91] Marx refers, in particular, to the pamphlet Labour Defended against the Claims of Capital (see previous note).— 231
[92] Marx discussed this example in greater detail in the manuscripts of 1861-63, where he writes: "...The workman employed by a piano maker is a productive labourer... But assume on the contrary that I buy all the materials required for a piano (or for all it matters the labourer himself may possess them), and that instead of buying the piano in a shop I have it made for me in my house. The workman who makes the piano is now an unproductive labourer, because his labour is exchanged directly against my revenue" (see present edition, Vol. 31). Marx also showed that "a singer who sells her song for her own account is an unproductive labourer. But the same singer commissioned by an entrepreneur to sing in order to make money for him is a productive labourer; for she produces capital" (see present edition, Vol. 34). " The same kind of labour," Marx concludes, "may be productive or unproductive".—231
[65] This passage, attributed by Marx to Malthus, is actually by the editor of the second posthumous edition of Malthus' book (1836), who tried to give a more precise formulation of Malthus' ideas.—160, 232
[94] "Price of production" (Produktionspreis) means here the same as, in the preceding paragraph and elsewhere in this manuscript, "production costs" or "the necessary price of the commodity" (see Note 56). In his manuscript of 1857-58 Marx did not yet make a clear distinction between value and the price of production.— 241
[96] This refers to Marx's notebook of excerpts from and critical commentaries on Ricardo (Notebook VIII).—242
[97] Marx also analysed Proudhon's views on interest in the manuscripts of 1861-63 (see present edition, Vol. 32).—245
[98] This is the first time Marx uses the term "surplus labour" in this work.— 250
[100] 00 A detailed analysis of Malthus' theory of value and, in particular, of his critique of Ricardo is given in Marx's manuscripts of 1861-63 (see present edition, Vol. 32).—252
[101] 01 Marx discusses the Physiocrats' role as the "fathers of modern political economy" in the manuscripts of 1861-63 (see present edition, Vol. 30).— 253
[102] This is the first time ever that Marx uses the term "necessary labour".— 260
[104] 04 This is the first time ever that Marx uses the term "relative surplus value".—
[12] Determination is negation—Marx quotes this thesis of Spinoza in the widely accepted interpretation given it by Hegel. In Spinoza, it means "limitation is negation" (Epistolae doctorum quorundam virorum ad B. de Spinoza et auctoris responsiones; ad aliorum ejus operum elucidationem non parum facientes. Epistola L 1674). Hegel's interpretation emphasises the element of negation 2 Junii inherent in any determined being, in any particular thing (see his Wissenschaft der Logik, Book I, Part I, Chapter 2, note on "Reality and Negation" and his Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften, Part I; Wissenschaft der Logik, § 91, Addendum).—28
[28] College de France—a higher educational establishment founded in Paris in 1530.—63
[105] 05 This example can be presented as follows: Before the doubling of productivity, a working day of, say, 8 hours fell into 2 hours of necessary labour and 6 hours of surplus labour. After the doubling, it falls into 1 hour of necessary labour and 7 hours of surplus labour.—264
[107] 07 Marx gives a detailed analysis of Ricardo's views on the accumulation of capital in the manuscripts of 1861-63 (see present edition, Vol. 32).—271
[108] 08 Marx means his Notebook VIII of excerpts on political economy (1851). It includes, in particular, a synopsis of Ricardo's On the Principles of Political Economy, and Taxation (see Note 99) with Marx's commentaries. On pp. 35-37 he has an abstract of Chapter XX ("Value and Riches, Their Distinctive Properties") of Ricardo's book. He is referring to this chapter.— 274
[110] Marx is referring to his abstract, in Excerpt Notebook VIII, of the opening part of Chapter VII ("On Foreign Trade") of Ricardo's book.—276
[111] Marx gives a detailed critique of Malthus' views on value and surplus value in the manuscripts of 1861-63 (see present edition, Vol. 32).— 279
[112] This refers to G. Ramsay (who writes in An Essay on the Distribution of Wealth, Edinburgh, London, 1836, p. 55: "Capital is a source of value independent of labour") and particularly to N. W. Senior (see his Letters on the Factory Act, London, 1837, pp. 12-13).—282
[113] Here Marx proceeds from the assumption that the capitalised surplus value is wholly spent on the purchase of new labour power—"an impossible assumption", as he says himself a few lines further.— 294
[40] Apparently a reference to John Francis Bray's book Labour's Wrongs and Labour's Remedy, Leeds, 1839, p. 141.—99
[140] The insertion "(Wrong!)", added by Marx later, refers to the sentence immediately preceding it. In the course of his further work on the manuscript, Marx demonstrated that the duration of the production process depended on a number of circumstances (see, e.g., this volume, pp. 521-22).— 441
[114] u / 1 2 114 In the manuscript, there follow the words: "sind erst V5 vom 100 und vom 100 zuviel gerechnet; V5 vom 100=20%, n/ 1 2 vom 100 84/12% oder 8 V3%."—295
[115] There follows a blank space in the manuscript, presumably for calculations referring to the second case.—295
[19] A Manchester firm which designed tools, machines and locomotives. From 1843 it was headed by Richard Roberts, the inventor of many machines, including the self-actor.—47
[118] On the qualitative limit to the accumulation of capital see Marx's manuscripts of 1861-63 (present edition, vols. 32 and 34).—298
[48] The Code of Manu (Mânava Dharma-Çâstra)—an old Hindu collection of laws and precepts, the product of an early attempt at codifying common law in accordance with the needs of the ancient Hindu state and the dogmas of Brahmanism. It is attributed to Manu ("man" in Sanskrit), the mythical progenitor of human beings. The laws and precepts making up the Code of Manu were accumulated over the centuries and given their more or less definitive formulation at about the beginning of the Christian era. They reflected the specific nature of the early class society in India, which was retaining many survivals of the primitive communal system.—117
[3] According to Bastiat, "the workers' pension fund" was to be made up of contributions by the workers themselves, for thus alone the necessary degree of "stability" could be ensured (Fr. Bastiat, Harmonies économiques, 2nd edition, Paris, 1851, p. 395).—11
[1] The unfinished draft manuscript "Bastiat and Carey", the first of Marx's Economic Manuscripts of 1857-58, takes up the first seven pages in one of the seven notebooks containing the main manuscript of that cycle, the Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft). However, the date, "July 1857", which Marx put on the cover of that notebook, shows that "Bastiat and Carey" was written somewhat earlier than the Outlines. Pages 1, 2, 3 and the upper half of page 4 contain the "Avantpropos" (Introductory Notes) to "Bastiat and Carey", the lower half of page 4 is blank, and pages 5-7 are taken up by a passage entitled "XIV. De salaires". From page 8 onwards, there follows the continuation of the text contained in Notebook II of the main manuscript (see page 219 of this volume). Marx marked this continuation "Notebook III" and dated it "November 29 and 30, and December 1857". Since in the manuscript the draft bears the same subtitle as Bastiat's book, it may be assumed that Marx originally wanted to write an extensive review, but later decided that the book did not deserve detailed discussion, and therefore gave up his original intention. The draft goes beyond the bounds of an ordinary review. In the "Avantpropos", Marx sums up the bourgeois political economy of his time and strictly delimits the era of classical political economy as beginning in the late 17th century, with the works of Petty and Boisguillebert, and ending in the first third of the 19th century, with the writings of Ricardo and Sismondi. He shows that the bourgeois economists of the subsequent period were either epigones of the classics or vulgar critics of them. The works of the Frenchman Bastiat and the American Carey, directed above all against Ricardo, were examples of that kind of criticism. The title "Bastiat and Carey" occurs in Marx's "References to My Own Notebooks", written in the summer of 1861 (see present edition, Vol. 29). This shows that Marx himself regarded the draft as part of his Economic Manuscripts of 1857-58. He quotes from Bastiat partly in French and partly in German translation. In this volume, all quotations are in English; only foreign-language phrases in Marx's own text are given in the language of the original. The draft was first published in the journal Die Neue Zeit, Vol. 2, No. 27, Stuttgart, 1903-1904. In English, it first appeared, under the title "Critique of Bastiat and Carey", in Marx's Grundrisse by David McLellan, Macmillan Press Ltd., London, 1971, pp. 47-58 and in: Karl Marx, Grundrisse. Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft). Translated with a Foreword by Martin Nicolaus. Penguin Books in association with New Left Review. London, 1973, pp. 883-93.-5
[93] In Kantian terminology, an analytical proposition is one in which the predicate merely explains the content of the subject, as distinct from synthetic propositions, in which the predicate adds to the subject an attribute not inherent in it.— 239
[4] Marx means the philosophical and historical constructions in Proudhon's book Système des contradictions économiques, ou Philosophie de la misère (Paris, 1846). In 1847 Marx attacked them in The Poverty of Philosophy. Answer to the "Philosophy of Poverty" by M. Proudhon (see present edition, Vol. 6, pp. 105-212, particularly pp. 111-15 and 157-60).—13
[2] This refers to Chapter XIV in the second edition of Bastiat's book Harmonies économiques (there are 25 chapters in that edition). Since this section of the draft "Bastiat and Carey" begins on page 5 of the manuscript, while half of page 4 was left blank, it may be assumed that Marx originally intended to discuss Bastiat's book in greater detail, giving, in particular, an account of the preceding 13 chapters.—11
[6] This Introduction, prefaced by Marx to the Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy, the first rough draft of Capital, holds an important place among his Economic Manuscripts of 1857-58. It is contained in Notebook M, marked "London, 23 August '57", which is probably the day when Marx began writing the Introduction. He interrupted this work, in all likelihood, in the last days of August, leaving the Introduction unfinished. On the cover of Notebook M, Marx listed the main items to be discussed in the Introduction. The headings of the individual sections in this table of contents differ somewhat from the corresponding headings in the text proper. Marx's list is as follows: "Contents "A. Introduction "1) Production in general "2) General relationship between production, distribution, exchange and consumption "3) The method of political economy "4) The means (forces) of production and production relations; production relations and relations of intercourse, etc." As the table reflects the overall structure of the Introduction more accurately than the headings of some of the sections in the text do, one may assume that Marx wrote it after drafting the Introduction. The fourth, closing section is in the form of a detailed outline. Of the subsections listed in it, only subsection 1, containing Marx's views on art, was written, and even that not in full. For instance contrary to his original intention, he did not investigate the relation of Shakespeare to the modern world. Having put to paper his views on Greek art, Marx broke off the work on the Introduction. Later, when preparing the manuscripts for publication, he abandoned his intention to open them with an extensive introduction and confined himself to a shorter preface formulating in brief the general philosophical premisses of his method of economic research (the materialist conception of history). In the Preface to Part One of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, dated January 1859, Marx wrote: "A general introduction, which I had drafted, is omitted, since on further consideration it seems to me confusing to anticipate results which still have to be substantiated, and the reader who really wishes to follow me will have to decide to advance from the particular to the general" (see present edition, Vol. 29). The Introduction was first published in the journal Die Neue Zeit, Vol. 1, Nos. 23-25, Stuttgart, 1902-1903. In English, in first appeared in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy by Karl Marx. Translated from the second German edition by N. I. Stone. With an appendix containing Marx's Introduction to the Critique recently published among his posthumous papers. Charles H. Kirr & Company, Chicago, 1904, pp. 265-312. It was also published in Marx and Modern Economics, ed. by D. Horowitz. Mac Gibbon & Kee, London, 1968, pp. 21-48, in Marx's Grundrisse by David McLellan, Macmillan Press Ltd., London, 1971, pp. 16-46, and in Karl Marx, Grundrisse. Translated with a Foreword by Martin Nicolaus. London, 1973, pp. 81-111.—17
[8] Contrat social—in Rousseau's theory, the voluntary agreement entered into by primitive people — originally living in "the state of nature"—which led to the formation of the political state. The theory was set forth in Rousseau's Du Contrat social; ou Principes du droit politique, London, 1782.—17
[9] The term bürgerliche Gesellschaft (see G.W.F. Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, in: Werke, Vol. 8, Berlin, 1833, § 182, Addendum) was used by Marx, even in his early writings, in two senses: in a broader one, to denote the economic system of society regardless of the historical stage of its development, i.e. the totality of material relations determining the political institutions and ideological life; and in a narrower one, to denote the material relations of bourgeois society (later, bourgeois society as a whole), i.e. capitalism. Depending on the context, the term is translated in this edition either as "bourgeois society" or as "civil society".—17
[5] The "supreme being" {être suprême) was Voltaire's designation of God, whom he, in contrast to the positive religions, described as an impersonal rational creator, who, having, laid down the laws of the world and given it an initial impulse, has refrained from any further intervention in the natural course of events.—13
[7] The heading "I. Production, Consumption, Distribution, Exchange (Circulation)" does not occur in Marx's table of contents on the cover of Notebook M and refers, strictly speaking, only to the first two sections of the Introduction, that headed "Production" (the heading in the table of contents on the cover is more accurate: "Production in general") and that headed "The General Relation of Production to Distribution, Exchange and Consumption". There are no Roman numerals in the further text of the Introduction to correspond to the figure I marking the section "Production, Consumption, Distribution, Exchange (Circulation)".—17
[15] Speaking of "what is called exchange between dealers and dealers", Marx has in mind Adam Smith's division of circulation into that between dealers, and that between dealers, on the one hand, and individual consumers, on the other (see Smith's An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Vol. II, Book II, Chapter II).—36
[16] Marx drew the data on pre-Spanish Peru from the American scholar William Hickling Prescott's History of the Conquest of Peru, with a preliminary view of the civilisation of the Incas, in three volumes, 4th ed., London, 1850. Excerpts from Volume I of this book are contained in Marx's Notebook XIV, begun in London in 1851. That the Incas had no knowledge of money is stated on p. 147 of Volume I.—40
[32] Wilhelm Weitling's theory of labour money is set forth in his book Garantien der Harmonie und Freiheit, Vevey, 1842, pp. 153-75. Speaking of the English supporters of this theory, Marx means John Francis Bray, Thomas Hodgskin, William Thompson and other adherents of Robert Owen, who tried to draw socialist conclusions from the economic theory of Ricardo. Marx gave a critical analysis of the views of these Utopian socialists in The Poverty of Philosophy. Answer to the "Philosophy of Poverty" by M. Proudhon (see present edition, Vol. 6). Later he discussed their theory of "labour money", as propounded, e.g., by John Gray, in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Part One (see present edition, Vol. 29).—73
[10] In subsequent years Marx modified his views on family relations in primitive society and the early tribal system in accordance with the latest studies in ethnography and ancient history, notably the books Das Mutterrecht by the Swiss historian Johann Jacob Bachofen and Society by the American Ancient anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan, published in the 1860s and 1870s. In particular, he abandoned the view, commonly held by historians in the 1840s and 1850s, asserting the primacy of the family and the secondary nature of the tribe and deriving the tribe from the developing family. The new conception of the relation between tribe and family was reflected, in particular, in Marx's synopsis of Morgan's Ancient Society. Frederick Engels drew on this book in writing The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.—18