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proletariat, and on the look-out for circumstances favourable to this transformation. (Manufacture
is used here in the sense of all non-agricultural industries.)
23
This source of relative surplus
population is thus constantly flowing. But the constant flow towards the towns pre-supposes, in
the country itself, a constant latent surplus population, the extent of which becomes evident only
when its channels of outlet open to exceptional width. The agricultural labourer is therefore
reduced to the minimum of wages, and always stands with one foot already in the swamp of
pauperism.
The third category of the relative surplus population, the stagnant, forms a part of the active
labour army, but with extremely irregular employment. Hence it furnishes to capital an
inexhaustible reservoir of disposable labour power. Its conditions of life sink below the average
normal level of the working class; this makes it at once the broad basis of special branches of
capitalist exploitation. It is characterised by maximum of working-time, and minimum of wages.
We have learnt to know its chief form under the rubric of “domestic industry.” It recruits itself
constantly from the supernumerary forces of modern industry and agriculture, and specially from
those decaying branches of industry where handicraft is yielding to manufacture, manufacture to
machinery. Its extent grows, as with the extent and energy of accumulation, the creation of a
surplus population advances. But it forms at the same time a self-reproducing and self-
perpetuating element of the working class, taking a proportionally greater part in the general
increase of that class than the other elements. In fact, not only the number of births and deaths,
but the absolute size of the families stand in inverse proportion to the height of wages, and
therefore to the amount of means of subsistence of which the different categories of labourers
dispose. This law of capitalistic society would sound absurd to savages, or even civilised
colonists. It calls to mind the boundless reproduction of animals individually weak and constantly
hunted down.
24
The lowest sediment of the relative surplus population finally dwells in the sphere of pauperism.
Exclusive of vagabonds, criminals, prostitutes, in a word, the “dangerous” classes, this layer of
society consists of three categories. First, those able to work. One need only glance superficially
at the statistics of English pauperism to find that the quantity of paupers increases with every
crisis, and diminishes with every revival of trade. Second, orphans and pauper children. These are
candidates for the industrial reserve army, and are, in times of great prosperity, as 1860, e.g.,
speedily and in large numbers enrolled in the active army of labourers. Third, the demoralised
and ragged, and those unable to work, chiefly people who succumb to their incapacity for
adaptation, due to the division of labour; people who have passed the normal age of the labourer;
the victims of industry, whose number increases with the increase of dangerous machinery, of
mines, chemical works, &c., the mutilated, the sickly, the widows, &c. Pauperism is the hospital
of the active labour-army and the dead weight of the industrial reserve army. Its production is
included in that of the relative surplus population, its necessity in theirs; along with the surplus
population, pauperism forms a condition of capitalist production, and of the capitalist
development of wealth. It enters into the faux frais of capitalist production; but capital knows
how to throw these, for the most part, from its own shoulders on to those of the working class and
the lower middle class.
The greater the social wealth, the functioning capital, the extent and energy of its growth, and,
therefore, also the absolute mass of the proletariat and the productiveness of its labour, the greater
is the industrial reserve army. The same causes which develop the expansive power of capital,
develop also the labour power at its disposal. The relative mass of the industrial reserve army
increases therefore with the potential energy of wealth. But the greater this reserve army in
proportion to the active labour army, the greater is the mass of a consolidated surplus population,
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whose misery is in inverse ratio to its torment of labour. The more extensive, finally, the lazarus
layers of the working class, and the industrial reserve army, the greater is official pauperism. This
is the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation. Like all other laws it is modified in its
working by many circumstances, the analysis of which does not concern us here.
The folly is now patent of the economic wisdom that preaches to the labourers the
accommodation of their number to the requirements of capital. The mechanism of capitalist
production and accumulation constantly effects this adjustment. The first word of this adaptation
is the creation of a relative surplus population, or industrial reserve army. Its last word is the
misery of constantly extending strata of the active army of labour, and the dead weight of
pauperism.
The law by which a constantly increasing quantity of means of production, thanks to the advance
in the productiveness of social labour, may be set in movement by a progressively diminishing
expenditure of human power, this law, in a capitalist society – where the labourer does not
employ the means of production, but the means of production employ the labourer – undergoes a
complete inversion and is expressed thus: the higher the productiveness of labour, the greater is
the pressure of the labourers on the means of employment, the more precarious, therefore,
becomes their condition of existence, viz., the sale of their own labour power for the increasing of
another’s wealth, or for the self-expansion of capital. The fact that the means of production, and
the productiveness of labour, increase more rapidly than the productive population, expresses
itself, therefore, capitalistically in the inverse form that the labouring population always increases
more rapidly than the conditions under which capital can employ this increase for its own self-
expansion.
We saw in Part IV., when analysing the production of relative surplus-value: within the capitalist
system all methods for raising the social productiveness of labour are brought about at the cost of
the individual labourer; all means for the development of production transform themselves into
means of domination over, and exploitation of, the producers; they mutilate the labourer into a
fragment of a man, degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, destroy every remnant
of charm in his work and turn it into a hated toil; they estrange from him the intellectual
potentialities of the labour process in the same proportion as science is incorporated in it as an
independent power; they distort the conditions under which he works, subject him during the
labour process to a despotism the more hateful for its meanness; they transform his life-time into
working-time, and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the Juggernaut of capital. But all
methods for the production of surplus-value are at the same time methods of accumulation; and
every extension of accumulation becomes again a means for the development of those methods. It
follows therefore that in proportion as capital accumulates, the lot of the labourer, be his payment
high or low, must grow worse. The law, finally, that always equilibrates the relative surplus
population, or industrial reserve army, to the extent and energy of accumulation, this law rivets
the labourer to capital more firmly than the wedges of Vulcan did Prometheus to the rock. It
establishes an accumulation of misery, corresponding with accumulation of capital. Accumulation
of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil slavery,
ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole, i.e., on the side of the class that
produces its own product in the form of capital.
25
This antagonistic character of capitalistic
accumulation is enunciated in various forms by political economists, although by them it is
confounded with phenomena, certainly to some extent analogous, but nevertheless essentially
distinct, and belonging to pre-capitalistic modes of production.
The Venetian monk Ortes, one of the great economic writers of the 18th century, regards the
antagonism of capitalist production as a general natural law of social wealth.