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whether the fusion of a number of capitals already formed or in process of formation takes place
by the smoother process of organising joint-stock companies – the economic effect remains the
same. Everywhere the increased scale of industrial establishments is the starting point for a more
comprehensive organisation of the collective work of many, for a wider development of their
material motive forces – in other words, for the progressive transformation of isolated processes
of production, carried on by customary methods, into processes of production socially combined
and scientifically arranged.
But accumulation, the gradual increase of capital by reproduction as it passes from the circular to
the spiral form, is clearly a very slow procedure compared with centralisation, which has only to
change the quantitative groupings of the constituent parts of social capital. The world would still
be without railways if it had had to wait until accumulation had got a few individual capitals far
enough to be adequate for the construction of a railway. Centralisation, on the contrary,
accomplished this in the twinkling of an eye, by means of joint-stock companies. And whilst
centralisation thus intensifies and accelerates the effects of accumulation, it simultaneously
extends and speeds those revolutions in the technical composition of capital which raise its
constant portion at the expense of its variable portion, thus diminishing the relative demand for
labour.
The masses of capital fused together overnight by centralisation reproduce and multiply as the
others do, only more rapidly, thereby becoming new and powerful levers in social accumulation.
Therefore, when we speak of the progress of social accumulation we tacitly include – today – the
effects of centralisation.
The additional capitals formed in the normal course of accumulation (see Chapter XXIV, Section
1) serve particularly as vehicles for the exploitation of new inventions and discoveries, and
industrial improvements in general. But in time the old capital also reaches the moment of
renewal from top to toe, when it sheds its skin and is reborn like the others in a perfected
technical form, in which a smaller quantity of labour will suffice to set in motion a larger quantity
of machinery and raw materials. The absolute reduction in the demand for labour which
necessarily follows from this is obviously so much the greater the higher the degree in which the
capitals undergoing this process of renewal are already massed together by virtue of the
centralisation movement.
On the one hand, therefore, the additional capital formed in the course of accumulation attracts
fewer and fewer labourers in proportion to its magnitude. On the other hand, the old capital
periodically reproduced with change of composition, repels more and more of the labourers
formerly employed by it.
Section 3: Progressive Production of a Relative surplus
population or Industrial Reserve Army
The accumulation of capital, though originally appearing as its quantitative extension only, is
effected, as we have seen, under a progressive qualitative change in its composition, under a
constant increase of its constant, at the expense of its variable constituent.
13
The specifically capitalist mode of production, the development of the productive power of labour
corresponding to it, and the change thence resulting in the organic composition of capital, do not
merely keep pace with the advance of accumulation, or with the growth of social wealth. They
develop at a much quicker rate, because mere accumulation, the absolute increase of the total
social capital, is accompanied by the centralisation of the individual capitals of which that total is
made up; and because the change in the technological composition of the additional capital goes
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hand in hand with a similar change in the technological composition of the original capital. With
the advance of accumulation, therefore, the proportion of constant to variable capital changes. If
it was originally say 1:1, it now becomes successively 2:1, 3:1, 4:1, 5:1, 7:1, &c., so that, as the
capital increases, instead of ½ of its total value, only 1/3, 1/4, 1/5, 1/6, 1/8, &c., is transformed
into labour-power, and, on the other hand, 2/3, 3/4, 4/5, 5/6, 7/8 into means of production. Since
the demand for labour is determined not by the amount of capital as a whole, but by its variable
constituent alone, that demand falls progressively with the increase of the total capital, instead of,
as previously assumed, rising in proportion to it. It falls relatively to the magnitude of the total
capital, and at an accelerated rate, as this magnitude increases. With the growth of the total
capital, its variable constituent or the labour incorporated in it, also does increase, but in a
constantly diminishing proportion. The intermediate pauses are shortened, in which accumulation
works as simple extension of production, on a given technical basis. It is not merely that an
accelerated accumulation of total capital, accelerated in a constantly growing progression, is
needed to absorb an additional number of labourers, or even, on account of the constant
metamorphosis of old capital, to keep employed those already functioning. In its turn, this
increasing accumulation and centralisation becomes a source of new changes in the composition
of capital, of a more accelerated diminution of its variable, as compared with its constant
constituent. This accelerated relative diminution of the variable constituent, that goes along with
the accelerated increase of the total capital, and moves more rapidly than this increase, takes the
inverse form, at the other pole, of an apparently absolute increase of the labouring population, an
increase always moving more rapidly than that of the variable capital or the means of
employment. But in fact, it is capitalistic accumulation itself that constantly produces, and
produces in the direct ratio of its own energy and extent, a relatively redundant population of
labourers, i.e., a population of greater extent than suffices for the average needs of the self-
expansion of capital, and therefore a surplus population.
Considering the social capital in its totality, the movement of its accumulation now causes
periodical changes, affecting it more or less as a whole, now distributes its various phases
simultaneously over the different spheres of production. In some spheres a change in the
composition of capital occurs without increase of its absolute magnitude, as a consequence of
simple centralisation; in others the absolute growth of capital is connected with absolute
diminution of its variable constituent, or of the labour power absorbed by it; in others again,
capital continues growing for a time on its given technical basis, and attracts additional labour
power in proportion to its increase, while at other times it undergoes organic change, and lessens
its variable constituent; in all spheres, the increase of the variable part of capital, and therefore of
the number of labourers employed by it, is always connected with violent fluctuations and
transitory production of surplus population, whether this takes the more striking form of the
repulsion of labourers already employed, or the less evident but not less real form of the more
difficult absorption of the additional labouring population through the usual channels.
14
With the
magnitude of social capital already functioning, and the degree of its increase, with the extension
of the scale of production, and the mass of the labourers set in motion, with the development of
the productiveness of their labour, with the greater breadth and fulness of all sources of wealth,
there is also an extension of the scale on which greater attraction of labourers by capital is
accompanied by their greater repulsion; the rapidity of the change in the organic composition of
capital, and in its technical form increases, and an increasing number of spheres of production
becomes involved in this change, now simultaneously, now alternately. The labouring population
therefore produces, along with the accumulation of capital produced by it, the means by which it
itself is made relatively superfluous, is turned into a relative surplus population; and it does this to
an always increasing extent.
15
This is a law of population peculiar to the capitalist mode of