420
Chapter 24
Namely, from those who ply the industry of appropriating the fruits of others’ industry. All the
conditions for carrying on the labour process are suddenly converted into so many acts of
abstinence on the part of the capitalist. If the corn is not all eaten, but part of it also sown –
abstinence of the capitalist. If the wine gets time to mature – abstinence of the capitalist
30
The
capitalist robs his own self, whenever he “lends (!) the instruments of production to the labourer,”
that is, whenever by incorporating labour-power with them, he uses them to extract surplus-value
out of that labour-power, instead of eating them up, steam-engines, cotton, railways, manure,
horses, and all; or as the vulgar economist childishly puts it, instead of dissipating “their value” in
luxuries and other articles of consumption.
31
How the capitalists as a class are to perform that
feat, is a secret that vulgar economy has hitherto obstinately refused to divulge. Enough, that the
world still jogs on, solely through the self-chastisement of this modern penitent of Vishnu, the
capitalist. Not only accumulation, but the simple “conservation of a capital requires a constant
effort to resist the temptation of consuming it.”
32
The simple dictates of humanity therefore
plainly enjoin the release of the capitalist from this
martyrdom and temptation, in the same way
that the Georgian slave-owner was lately delivered, by the abolition of slavery, from the painful
dilemma, whether to squander the surplus-product, lashed out of his niggers, entirely in
champagne, or whether to reconvert a part of it into more niggers and more land.
In economic forms of society of the most different kinds, there occurs, not only simple
reproduction, but, in varying degrees, reproduction on a progressively increasing scale. By
degrees more is produced and more consumed, and consequently more products have to be
converted into means of production. This process, however, does not present itself as
accumulation of capital, nor as the function of a capitalist, so long as the labourer’s means of
production, and with them, his product and means of subsistence, do not confront him in the
shape of capital.
33
Richard Jones, who died a few years ago, and was the successor of Malthus in
the chair of Political Economy at Haileybury College, discusses this point well in the light of two
important facts. Since the great mass of the Hindu population are peasants cultivating their land
themselves, their products, their instruments of labour and means of subsistence never take “the
shape of a fund saved from revenue, which fund has, therefore, gone through a previous process
of accumulation.”
34
On the other hand, the non-agricultural labourers in those provinces where
the English rule has least disturbed the old system, are directly employed by the magnates, to
whom a portion of the agricultural surplus-product is rendered in the shape of tribute or rent. One
portion of this product is consumed by the magnates in kind, another is converted, for their use,
by the labourers, into articles of luxury and such like things, while the rest forms the wages of the
labourers, who own their implements of labour. Here, production and reproduction on a
progressively increasing scale, go on their way without any intervention from that queer saint,
that knight of the woeful countenance, the capitalist “abstainer.”
421
Chapter 24
Section 4: Circumstances that, Independently of the
Proportional Division of Surplus-Value into Capital and
Revenue, Determine the Amount of Accumulation.
Degree of Exploitation of Labour-Power. Productivity of
Labour. Growing Difference in Amount Between Capital
Employed and Capital Consumed. Magnitude of Capital
Advanced
The proportion in which surplus-value breaks up into capital and revenue being given, the
magnitude of the capital accumulated clearly depends on the absolute magnitude of the surplus-
value. Suppose that 80 per cent. were capitalised and 20 per cent. eaten up, the accumulated
capital will be £2,400 or £200, according as the total surplus-value has amounted to £3,000 or
£500. Hence all the circumstances that determine the mass of surplus-value operate to determine
the magnitude of the accumulation. We sum them up once again, but only in so far as they afford
new points of view in regard to accumulation.
It will be remembered that the rate of surplus-value depends, in the first place, on the degree of
exploitation of labour-power. Political Economy values this fact so highly, that it occasionally
identifies the acceleration of accumulation due to increased productiveness of labour, with its
acceleration due to increased exploitation of the labourer.
35
In the chapters on the production of
surplus-value it was constantly presupposed that wages are at least equal to the value of labour-
power. Forcible reduction of wages below this value plays, however, in practice too important a
part, for us not to pause upon it for a moment. It, in fact, transforms, within certain limits, the
labourer’s necessary consumption fund into a fund for the accumulation of capital.
“Wages,” says John Stuart Mill, “have no productive power; they are the price of
a productive power. Wages do not contribute, along with labour, to the production
of commodities, no more than the price of tools contributes along with the tools
themselves. If labour could be had without purchase, wages might be dispensed
with.”
36
But if the labourers could live on air they could not be bought at any price. The zero of their cost
is therefore a limit in a mathematical sense, always beyond reach, although we can always
approximate more and more nearly to it. The constant tendency of capital is to force the cost of
labour back towards this zero. A writer of the 18th century, often quoted already, the author of the
“Essay on Trade and Commerce,” only betrays the innermost secret soul of English capitalism,
when he declares the historic mission of England to be the forcing down of English wages to the
level of the French and the Dutch.
37
With other things he says naively:
“But if our poor” (technical term for labourers) “will live luxuriously ... then
labour must, of course, be dear ... When it is considered what luxuries the
manufacturing populace consume, such as brandy, gin, tea, sugar, foreign fruit,
strong beer, printed linens, snuff, tobacco, &c.”
38
He quotes the work of a Northamptonshire manufacturer, who, with eyes squinting heavenward
moans:
“Labour is one-third cheaper in France than in England; for their poor work hard,
and fare hard, as to their food and clothing. Their chief diet is bread, fruit, herbs,
roots, and dried fish; for they very seldom eat flesh; and when wheat is dear, they