Chapter 25: The General Law of Capitalist
Accumulation
Section 1: The Increased Demand for labour power that
Accompanies Accumulation, the Composition of Capital
Remaining the same
In this chapter we consider the influence of the growth of capital on the lot of the labouring class.
The most important factor in this inquiry is the composition of capital and the changes it
undergoes in the course of the process of accumulation.
The composition of capital is to be understood in a two-fold sense. On the side of value, it is
determined by the proportion in which it is divided into constant capital or value of the means of
production, and variable capital or value of labour power, the sum total of wages. On the side of
material, as it functions in the process of production, all capital is divided into means of
production and living labour power. This latter composition is determined by the relation between
the mass of the means of production employed, on the one hand, and the mass of labour necessary
for their employment on the other. I call the former the value-composition, the latter the technical
composition of capital.
Between the two there is a strict correlation. To express this, I call the value composition of
capital, in so far as it is determined by its technical composition and mirrors the changes of the
latter, the organic composition of capital. Wherever I refer to the composition of capital, without
further qualification, its organic composition is always understood.
The many individual capitals invested in a particular branch of production have, one with another,
more or less different compositions. The average of their individual compositions gives us the
composition of the total capital in this branch of production. Lastly, the average of these averages,
in all branches of production, gives us the composition of the total social capital of a country, and
with this alone are we, in the last resort, concerned in the following investigation.
Growth of capital involves growth of its variable constituent or of the part invested in labour
power. A part of the surplus-value turned into additional capital must always be re-transformed
into variable capital, or additional labour fund. If we suppose that, all other circumstances
remaining the same, the composition of capital also remains constant (i.e., that a definite mass of
means of production constantly needs the same mass of labour power to set it in motion), then the
demand for labour and the subsistence-fund of the labourers clearly increase in the same
proportion as the capital, and the more rapidly, the more rapidly the capital increases. Since the
capital produces yearly a surplus-value, of which one part is yearly added to the original capital;
since this increment itself grows yearly along with the augmentation of the capital already
functioning; since lastly, under special stimulus to enrichment, such as the opening of new
markets, or of new spheres for the outlay of capital in consequence of newly developed social
wants, &c., the scale of accumulation may be suddenly extended, merely by a change in the
division of the surplus-value or surplus-product into capital and revenue, the requirements of
accumulating capital may exceed the increase of labour power or of the number of labourers; the
demand for labourers may exceed the supply, and, therefore, wages may rise. This must, indeed,
ultimately be the case if the conditions supposed above continue. For since in each year more
labourers are employed than in its predecessor, sooner or later a point must be reached, at which
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Chapter 25
the requirements of accumulation begin to surpass the customary supply of labour, and, therefore,
a rise of wages takes place. A lamentation on this score was heard in England during the whole of
the fifteenth, and the first half of the eighteenth centuries. The more or less favourable
circumstances in which the wage working class supports and multiplies itself, in no way alter the
fundamental character of capitalist production. As simple reproduction constantly reproduces the
capital relation itself, i.e., the relation of capitalists on the one hand, and wage workers on the
other, so reproduction on a progressive scale, i.e., accumulation, reproduces the capital relation
on a progressive scale, more capitalists or larger capitalists at this pole, more wage workers at
that. The reproduction of a mass of labour power, which must incessantly re-incorporate itself
with capital for that capital’s self-expansion; which cannot get free from capital, and whose
enslavement to capital is only concealed by the variety of individual capitalists to whom it sells
itself, this reproduction of labour power forms, in fact, an essential of the reproduction of capital
itself. Accumulation of capital is, therefore, increase of the proletariat.
1
Classical economy grasped this fact so thoroughly that Adam Smith, Ricardo, &c., as mentioned
earlier, inaccurately identified accumulation with the consumption, by the productive labourers,
of all the capitalised part of the surplus-product, or with its transformation into additional wage
labourers. As early as 1696 John Bellers says:
“For if one had a hundred thousand acres of land and as many pounds in money,
and as many cattle, without a labourer, what would the rich man be, but a
labourer? And as the labourers make men rich, so the more labourers there will
be, the more rich men ... the labour of the poor being the mines of the rich.”
2
So also Bernard de Mandeville at the beginning of the eighteenth century:
“It would be easier, where property is well secured, to live without money than
without poor; for who would do the work? ... As they [the poor] ought to be kept
from starving, so they should receive nothing worth saving. If here and there one
of the lowest class by uncommon industry, and pinching his belly, lifts himself
above the condition he was brought up in, nobody ought to hinder him; nay, it is
undeniably the wisest course for every person in the society, and for every private
family to be frugal; but it is the interest of all rich nations, that the greatest part of
the poor should almost never be idle, and yet continually spend what they get....
Those that get their living by their daily labour ... have nothing to stir them up to
be serviceable but their wants which it is prudence to relieve, but folly to cure.
The only thing then that can render the labouring man industrious, is a moderate
quantity of money, for as too little will, according as his temper is, either dispirit
or make him desperate, so too much will make him insolent and lazy.... From
what has been said, it is manifest, that, in a free nation, where slaves are not
allowed of, the surest wealth consists in a multitude of laborious poor; for besides,
that they are the never-failing nursery of fleets and armies, without them there
could be no enjoyment, and no product of any country could be valuable. “To
make the society” [which of course consists of non-workers] “happy and people
easier under the meanest circumstances, it is requisite that great numbers of them
should be ignorant as well as poor; knowledge both enlarges and multiplies our
desires, and the fewer things a man wishes for, the more easily his necessities may
be supplied.”
3
What Mandeville, an honest, clear-headed man, had not yet seen, is that the mechanism of the
process of accumulation itself increases, along with the capital, the mass of “labouring poor,” i.e.,
the wage labourers, who turn their labour power into an increasing power of self-expansion of the