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-Capital
-A Critique of Political Economy
-Volume I
-Book One: The Process of Production of Capital
-First published: in German in 1867, English edition first published in 1887;
-Source: First English edition of 1887 (4th German edition changes included as indicated) with some
-modernisation of spelling;
-Publisher: Progress Publishers, Moscow, USSR;
-Translated: Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, edited by Frederick Engels;
-Transcribed: Zodiac, Hinrich Kuhls, Allan Thurrott, Bill McDorman, Bert Schultz and Martha
-Gimenez (1995-1996);
-Proofed: by Andy Blunden and Chris Clayton (2008), Mark Harris (2010), Dave Allinson (2015).
-
-Chapter 1: Commodities
-Section 1: The Two Factors of a Commodity:
-Use-Value and Value
-(The Substance of Value and the Magnitude of Value)
-The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself
-as “an immense accumulation of commodities,”1 its unit being a single commodity. Our
-investigation must therefore begin with the analysis of a commodity.
-A commodity is, in the first place, an object outside us, a thing that by its properties satisfies
-human wants of some sort or another. The nature of such wants, whether, for instance, they spring
-from the stomach or from fancy, makes no difference.2 Neither are we here concerned to know
-how the object satisfies these wants, whether directly as means of subsistence, or indirectly as
-means of production.
-Every useful thing, as iron, paper, &c., may be looked at from the two points of view of quality
-and quantity. It is an assemblage of many properties, and may therefore be of use in various ways.
-To discover the various uses of things is the work of history.3 So also is the establishment of
-socially-recognized standards of measure for the quantities of these useful objects. The diversity
-of these measures has its origin partly in the diverse nature of the objects to be measured, partly
-in convention.
-The utility of a thing makes it a use value.4 But this utility is not a thing of air. Being limited by
-the physical properties of the commodity, it has no existence apart from that commodity. A
-commodity, such as iron, corn, or a diamond, is therefore, so far as it is a material thing, a use
-value, something useful. This property of a commodity is independent of the amount of labour
-required to appropriate its useful qualities. When treating of use value, we always assume to be
-dealing with definite quantities, such as dozens of watches, yards of linen, or tons of iron. The use
-values of commodities furnish the material for a special study, that of the commercial knowledge
-of commodities.5 Use values become a reality only by use or consumption: they also constitute
-the substance of all wealth, whatever may be the social form of that wealth. In the form of society
-we are about to consider, they are, in addition, the material depositories of exchange value.
-Exchange value, at first sight, presents itself as a quantitative relation, as the proportion in which
-values in use of one sort are exchanged for those of another sort,6 a relation constantly changing
-with time and place. Hence exchange value appears to be something accidental and purely
-relative, and consequently an intrinsic value, i.e., an exchange value that is inseparably connected
-with, inherent in commodities, seems a contradiction in terms.7 Let us consider the matter a little
-more closely.
-A given commodity, e.g., a quarter of wheat is exchanged for x blacking, y silk, or z gold, &c. –
-in short, for other commodities in the most different proportions. Instead of one exchange value,
-the wheat has, therefore, a great many. But since x blacking, y silk, or z gold &c., each represents
-the exchange value of one quarter of wheat, x blacking, y silk, z gold, &c., must, as exchange
-values, be replaceable by each other, or equal to each other. Therefore, first: the valid exchange
-values of a given commodity express something equal; secondly, exchange value, generally, is
-only the mode of expression, the phenomenal form, of something contained in it, yet
-distinguishable from it.
-28 Chapter 1
-Let us take two commodities, e.g., corn and iron. The proportions in which they are
-exchangeable, whatever those proportions may be, can always be represented by an equation in
-which a given quantity of corn is equated to some quantity of iron: e.g., 1 quarter corn = x cwt.
-iron. What does this equation tell us? It tells us that in two different things – in 1 quarter of corn
-and x cwt. of iron, there exists in equal quantities something common to both. The two things
-must therefore be equal to a third, which in itself is neither the one nor the other. Each of them, so
-far as it is exchange value, must therefore be reducible to this third.
-A simple geometrical illustration will make this clear. In order to calculate and compare the areas
-of rectilinear figures, we decompose them into triangles. But the area of the triangle itself is
-expressed by something totally different from its visible figure, namely, by half the product of the
-base multiplied by the altitude. In the same way the exchange values of commodities must be
-capable of being expressed in terms of something common to them all, of which thing they
-represent a greater or less quantity.
-This common “something” cannot be either a geometrical, a chemical, or any other natural
-property of commodities. Such properties claim our attention only in so far as they affect the
-utility of those commodities, make them use values. But the exchange of commodities is
-evidently an act characterised by a total abstraction from use value. Then one use value is just as
-good as another, provided only it be present in sufficient quantity. Or, as old Barbon says,
-“one sort of wares are as good as another, if the values be equal. There is no
-difference or distinction in things of equal value ... An hundred pounds’ worth of
-lead or iron, is of as great value as one hundred pounds’ worth of silver or gold.”8
-As use values, commodities are, above all, of different qualities, but as exchange values they are
-merely different quantities, and consequently do not contain an atom of use value.
-If then we leave out of consideration the use value of commodities, they have only one common
-property left, that of being products of labour. But even the product of labour itself has undergone
-a change in our hands. If we make abstraction from its use value, we make abstraction at the same
-time from the material elements and shapes that make the product a use value; we see in it no
-longer a table, a house, yarn, or any other useful thing. Its existence as a material thing is put out
-of sight. Neither can it any longer be regarded as the product of the labour of the joiner, the
-mason, the spinner, or of any other definite kind of productive labour. Along with the useful
-qualities of the products themselves, we put out of sight both the useful character of the various
-kinds of labour embodied in them, and the concrete forms of that labour; there is nothing left but
-what is common to them all; all are reduced to one and the same sort of labour, human labour in
-the abstract.
-Let us now consider the residue of each of these products; it consists of the same unsubstantial
-reality in each, a mere congelation of homogeneous human labour, of labour power expended
-without regard to the mode of its expenditure. All that these things now tell us is, that human
-labour power has been expended in their production, that human labour is embodied in them.
-When looked at as crystals of this social substance, common to them all, they are – Values.
-We have seen that when commodities are exchanged, their exchange value manifests itself as
-something totally independent of their use value. But if we abstract from their use value, there
-remains their Value as defined above. Therefore, the common substance that manifests itself in
-the exchange value of commodities, whenever they are exchanged, is their value. The progress of
-our investigation will show that exchange value is the only form in which the value of
-commodities can manifest itself or be expressed. For the present, however, we have to consider
-the nature of value independently of this, its form.
-29 Chapter 1
-A use value, or useful article, therefore, has value only because human labour in the abstract has
-been embodied or materialised in it. How, then, is the magnitude of this value to be measured?
-Plainly, by the quantity of the value-creating substance, the labour, contained in the article. The
-quantity of labour, however, is measured by its duration, and labour time in its turn finds its
-standard in weeks, days, and hours.
-Some people might think that if the value of a commodity is determined by the quantity of labour
-spent on it, the more idle and unskilful the labourer, the more valuable would his commodity be,
-because more time would be required in its production. The labour, however, that forms the
-substance of value, is homogeneous human labour, expenditure of one uniform labour power. The
-total labour power of society, which is embodied in the sum total of the values of all commodities
-produced by that society, counts here as one homogeneous mass of human labour power,
-composed though it be of innumerable individual units. Each of these units is the same as any
-other, so far as it has the character of the average labour power of society, and takes effect as
-such; that is, so far as it requires for producing a commodity, no more time than is needed on an
-average, no more than is socially necessary. The labour time socially necessary is that required to
-produce an article under the normal conditions of production, and with the average degree of skill
-and intensity prevalent at the time. The introduction of power-looms into England probably
-reduced by one-half the labour required to weave a given quantity of yarn into cloth. The hand-
-loom weavers, as a matter of fact, continued to require the same time as before; but for all that,
-the product of one hour of their labour represented after the change only half an hour’s social
-labour, and consequently fell to one-half its former value.
-We see then that that which determines the magnitude of the value of any article is the amount of
-labour socially necessary, or the labour time socially necessary for its production.9 Each
-individual commodity, in this connexion, is to be considered as an average sample of its class.10
-Commodities, therefore, in which equal quantities of labour are embodied, or which can be
-produced in the same time, have the same value. The value of one commodity is to the value of
-any other, as the labour time necessary for the production of the one is to that necessary for the
-production of the other. “As values, all commodities are only definite masses of congealed labour
-time.”11
-The value of a commodity would therefore remain constant, if the labour time required for its
-production also remained constant. But the latter changes with every variation in the
-productiveness of labour. This productiveness is determined by various circumstances, amongst
-others, by the average amount of skill of the workmen, the state of science, and the degree of its
-practical application, the social organisation of production, the extent and capabilities of the
-means of production, and by physical conditions. For example, the same amount of labour in
-favourable seasons is embodied in 8 bushels of corn, and in unfavourable, only in four. The same
-labour extracts from rich mines more metal than from poor mines. Diamonds are of very rare
-occurrence on the earth’s surface, and hence their discovery costs, on an average, a great deal of
-labour time. Consequently much labour is represented in a small compass. Jacob doubts whether
-gold has ever been paid for at its full value. This applies still more to diamonds. According to
-Eschwege, the total produce of the Brazilian diamond mines for the eighty years, ending in 1823,
-had not realised the price of one-and-a-half years’ average produce of the sugar and coffee
-plantations of the same country, although the diamonds cost much more labour, and therefore
-represented more value. With richer mines, the same quantity of labour would embody itself in
-more diamonds, and their value would fall. If we could succeed at a small expenditure of labour,
-in converting carbon into diamonds, their value might fall below that of bricks. In general, the
-greater the productiveness of labour, the less is the labour time required for the production of an
-30 Chapter 1
-article, the less is the amount of labour crystallised in that article, and the less is its value; and
-vice versâ, the less the productiveness of labour, the greater is the labour time required for the
-production of an article, and the greater is its value. The value of a commodity, therefore, varies
-directly as the quantity, and inversely as the productiveness, of the labour incorporated in it. *
-A thing can be a use value, without having value. This is the case whenever its utility to man is
-not due to labour. Such are air, virgin soil, natural meadows, &c. A thing can be useful, and the
-product of human labour, without being a commodity. Whoever directly satisfies his wants with
-the produce of his own labour, creates, indeed, use values, but not commodities. In order to
-produce the latter, he must not only produce use values, but use values for others, social use
-values. (And not only for others, without more. The mediaeval peasant produced quit-rent-corn
-for his feudal lord and tithe-corn for his parson. But neither the quit-rent-corn nor the tithe-corn
-became commodities by reason of the fact that they had been produced for others. To become a
-commodity a product must be transferred to another, whom it will serve as a use value, by means
-of an exchange.)12 Lastly nothing can have value, without being an object of utility. If the thing is
-useless, so is the labour contained in it; the labour does not count as labour, and therefore creates
-no value.
-Section 2: The Two-fold Character of the Labour Embodied in
-Commodities
-At first sight a commodity presented itself to us as a complex of two things – use value and
-exchange value. Later on, we saw also that labour, too, possesses the same two-fold nature; for,
-so far as it finds expression in value, it does not possess the same characteristics that belong to it
-as a creator of use values. I was the first to point out and to examine critically this two-fold nature
-of the labour contained in commodities. As this point is the pivot on which a clear comprehension
-of political economy turns, we must go more into detail.
-Let us take two commodities such as a coat and 10 yards of linen, and let the former be double
-the value of the latter, so that, if 10 yards of linen = W, the coat = 2W.
-The coat is a use value that satisfies a particular want. Its existence is the result of a special sort of
-productive activity, the nature of which is determined by its aim, mode of operation, subject,
-means, and result. The labour, whose utility is thus represented by the value in use of its product,
-or which manifests itself by making its product a use value, we call useful labour. In this
-connection we consider only its useful effect.
-As the coat and the linen are two qualitatively different use values, so also are the two forms of
-labour that produce them, tailoring and weaving. Were these two objects not qualitatively
-different, not produced respectively by labour of different quality, they could not stand to each
-other in the relation of commodities. Coats are not exchanged for coats, one use value is not
-exchanged for another of the same kind.
-To all the different varieties of values in use there correspond as many different kinds of useful
-labour, classified according to the order, genus, species, and variety to which they belong in the
-social division of labour. This division of labour is a necessary condition for the production of
-commodities, but it does not follow, conversely, that the production of commodities is a
-necessary condition for the division of labour. In the primitive Indian community there is social
-division of labour, without production of commodities. Or, to take an example nearer home, in
-every factory the labour is divided according to a system, but this division is not brought about by
-the operatives mutually exchanging their individual products. Only such products can become
-31 Chapter 1
-commodities with regard to each other, as result from different kinds of labour, each kind being
-carried on independently and for the account of private individuals.
-To resume, then: In the use value of each commodity there is contained useful labour, i.e.,
-productive activity of a definite kind and exercised with a definite aim. Use values cannot
-confront each other as commodities, unless the useful labour embodied in them is qualitatively
-different in each of them. In a community, the produce of which in general takes the form of
-commodities, i.e., in a community of commodity producers, this qualitative difference between
-the useful forms of labour that are carried on independently by individual producers, each on their
-own account, develops into a complex system, a social division of labour.
-Anyhow, whether the coat be worn by the tailor or by his customer, in either case it operates as a
-use value. Nor is the relation between the coat and the labour that produced it altered by the
-circumstance that tailoring may have become a special trade, an independent branch of the social
-division of labour. Wherever the want of clothing forced them to it, the human race made clothes
-for thousands of years, without a single man becoming a tailor. But coats and linen, like every
-other element of material wealth that is not the spontaneous produce of Nature, must invariably
-owe their existence to a special productive activity, exercised with a definite aim, an activity that
-appropriates particular nature-given materials to particular human wants. So far therefore as
-labour is a creator of use value, is useful labour, it is a necessary condition, independent of all
-forms of society, for the existence of the human race; it is an eternal nature-imposed necessity,
-without which there can be no material exchanges between man and Nature, and therefore no life.
-The use values, coat, linen, &c., i.e., the bodies of commodities, are combinations of two
-elements – matter and labour. If we take away the useful labour expended upon them, a material
-substratum is always left, which is furnished by Nature without the help of man. The latter can
-work only as Nature does, that is by changing the form of matter.13 Nay more, in this work of
-changing the form he is constantly helped by natural forces. We see, then, that labour is not the
-only source of material wealth, of use values produced by labour. As William Petty puts it, labour
-is its father and the earth its mother.
-Let us now pass from the commodity considered as a use value to the value of commodities.
-By our assumption, the coat is worth twice as much as the linen. But this is a mere quantitative
-difference, which for the present does not concern us. We bear in mind, however, that if the value
-of the coat is double that of 10 yds of linen, 20 yds of linen must have the same value as one coat.
-So far as they are values, the coat and the linen are things of a like substance, objective
-expressions of essentially identical labour. But tailoring and weaving are, qualitatively, different
-kinds of labour. There are, however, states of society in which one and the same man does
-tailoring and weaving alternately, in which case these two forms of labour are mere modifications
-of the labour of the same individual, and not special and fixed functions of different persons, just
-as the coat which our tailor makes one day, and the trousers which he makes another day, imply
-only a variation in the labour of one and the same individual. Moreover, we see at a glance that,
-in our capitalist society, a given portion of human labour is, in accordance with the varying
-demand, at one time supplied in the form of tailoring, at another in the form of weaving. This
-change may possibly not take place without friction, but take place it must.
-Productive activity, if we leave out of sight its special form, viz., the useful character of the
-labour, is nothing but the expenditure of human labour power. Tailoring and weaving, though
-qualitatively different productive activities, are each a productive expenditure of human brains,
-nerves, and muscles, and in this sense are human labour. They are but two different modes of
-expending human labour power. Of course, this labour power, which remains the same under all
-its modifications, must have attained a certain pitch of development before it can be expended in
-32 Chapter 1
-a multiplicity of modes. But the value of a commodity represents human labour in the abstract,
-the expenditure of human labour in general. And just as in society, a general or a banker plays a
-great part, but mere man, on the other hand, a very shabby part,14 so here with mere human
-labour. It is the expenditure of simple labour power, i.e., of the labour power which, on an
-average, apart from any special development, exists in the organism of every ordinary individual.
-Simple average labour, it is true, varies in character in different countries and at different times,
-but in a particular society it is given. Skilled labour counts only as simple labour intensified, or
-rather, as multiplied simple labour, a given quantity of skilled being considered equal to a greater
-quantity of simple labour. Experience shows that this reduction is constantly being made. A
-commodity may be the product of the most skilled labour, but its value, by equating it to the
-product of simple unskilled labour, represents a definite quantity of the latter labour alone.15 The
-different proportions in which different sorts of labour are reduced to unskilled labour as their
-standard, are established by a social process that goes on behind the backs of the producers, and,
-consequently, appear to be fixed by custom. For simplicity’s sake we shall henceforth account
-every kind of labour to be unskilled, simple labour; by this we do no more than save ourselves the
-trouble of making the reduction.
-Just as, therefore, in viewing the coat and linen as values, we abstract from their different use
-values, so it is with the labour represented by those values: we disregard the difference between
-its useful forms, weaving and tailoring. As the use values, coat and linen, are combinations of
-special productive activities with cloth and yarn, while the values, coat and linen, are, on the other
-hand, mere homogeneous congelations of undifferentiated labour, so the labour embodied in these
-latter values does not count by virtue of its productive relation to cloth and yarn, but only as being
-expenditure of human labour power. Tailoring and weaving are necessary factors in the creation
-of the use values, coat and linen, precisely because these two kinds of labour are of different
-qualities; but only in so far as abstraction is made from their special qualities, only in so far as
-both possess the same quality of being human labour, do tailoring and weaving form the
-substance of the values of the same articles.
-Coats and linen, however, are not merely values, but values of definite magnitude, and according
-to our assumption, the coat is worth twice as much as the ten yards of linen. Whence this
-difference in their values? It is owing to the fact that the linen contains only half as much labour
-as the coat, and consequently, that in the production of the latter, labour power must have been
-expended during twice the time necessary for the production of the former.
-While, therefore, with reference to use value, the labour contained in a commodity counts only
-qualitatively, with reference to value it counts only quantitatively, and must first be reduced to
-human labour pure and simple. In the former case, it is a question of How and What, in the latter
-of How much? How long a time? Since the magnitude of the value of a commodity represents
-only the quantity of labour embodied in it, it follows that all commodities, when taken in certain
-proportions, must be equal in value.
-If the productive power of all the different sorts of useful labour required for the production of a
-coat remains unchanged, the sum of the values of the coats produced increases with their number.
-If one coat represents x days’ labour, two coats represent 2x days’ labour, and so on. But assume
-that the duration of the labour necessary for the production of a coat becomes doubled or halved.
-In the first case one coat is worth as much as two coats were before; in the second case, two coats
-are only worth as much as one was before, although in both cases one coat renders the same
-service as before, and the useful labour embodied in it remains of the same quality. But the
-quantity of labour spent on its production has altered.
-33 Chapter 1
-An increase in the quantity of use values is an increase of material wealth. With two coats two
-men can be clothed, with one coat only one man. Nevertheless, an increased quantity of material
-wealth may correspond to a simultaneous fall in the magnitude of its value. This antagonistic
-movement has its origin in the two-fold character of labour. Productive power has reference, of
-course, only to labour of some useful concrete form, the efficacy of any special productive
-activity during a given time being dependent on its productiveness. Useful labour becomes,
-therefore, a more or less abundant source of products, in proportion to the rise or fall of its
-productiveness. On the other hand, no change in this productiveness affects the labour
-represented by value. Since productive power is an attribute of the concrete useful forms of
-labour, of course it can no longer have any bearing on that labour, so soon as we make abstraction
-from those concrete useful forms. However then productive power may vary, the same labour,
-exercised during equal periods of time, always yields equal amounts of value. But it will yield,
-during equal periods of time, different quantities of values in use; more, if the productive power
-rise, fewer, if it fall. The same change in productive power, which increases the fruitfulness of
-labour, and, in consequence, the quantity of use values produced by that labour, will diminish the
-total value of this increased quantity of use values, provided such change shorten the total labour
-time necessary for their production; and vice versâ.
-On the one hand all labour is, speaking physiologically, an expenditure of human labour power,
-and in its character of identical abstract human labour, it creates and forms the value of
-commodities. On the other hand, all labour is the expenditure of human labour power in a special
-form and with a definite aim, and in this, its character of concrete useful labour, it produces use
-values.16
-Section 3: The Form of Value or Exchange-Value
-Commodities come into the world in the shape of use values, articles, or goods, such as iron,
-linen, corn, &c. This is their plain, homely, bodily form. They are, however, commodities, only
-because they are something two-fold, both objects of utility, and, at the same time, depositories of
-value. They manifest themselves therefore as commodities, or have the form of commodities,
-only in so far as they have two forms, a physical or natural form, and a value form.
-The reality of the value of commodities differs in this respect from Dame Quickly, that we don’t
-know “where to have it.” The value of commodities is the very opposite of the coarse materiality
-of their substance, not an atom of matter enters into its composition. Turn and examine a single
-commodity, by itself, as we will, yet in so far as it remains an object of value, it seems impossible
-to grasp it. If, however, we bear in mind that the value of commodities has a purely social reality,
-and that they acquire this reality only in so far as they are expressions or embodiments of one
-identical social substance, viz., human labour, it follows as a matter of course, that value can only
-manifest itself in the social relation of commodity to commodity. In fact we started from
-exchange value, or the exchange relation of commodities, in order to get at the value that lies
-hidden behind it. We must now return to this form under which value first appeared to us.
-Every one knows, if he knows nothing else, that commodities have a value form common to them
-all, and presenting a marked contrast with the varied bodily forms of their use values. I mean their
-money form. Here, however, a task is set us, the performance of which has never yet even been
-attempted by bourgeois economy, the task of tracing the genesis of this money form, of
-developing the expression of value implied in the value relation of commodities, from its
-simplest, almost imperceptible outline, to the dazzling money-form. By doing this we shall, at the
-same time, solve the riddle presented by money.
-34 Chapter 1
-The simplest value-relation is evidently that of one commodity to some one other commodity of a
-different kind. Hence the relation between the values of two commodities supplies us with the
-simplest expression of the value of a single commodity.
-A. Elementary or Accidental Form Of Value
-x commodity A = y commodity B, or
-x commodity A is worth y commodity B.
-20 yards of linen = 1 coat, or
-20 Yards of linen are worth 1 coat.
-1. The two poles of the expression of value. Relative form and Equivalent
-form
-The whole mystery of the form of value lies hidden in this elementary form. Its analysis,
-therefore, is our real difficulty.
-Here two different kinds of commodities (in our example the linen and the coat), evidently play
-two different parts. The linen expresses its value in the coat; the coat serves as the material in
-which that value is expressed. The former plays an active, the latter a passive, part. The value of
-the linen is represented as relative value, or appears in relative form. The coat officiates as
-equivalent, or appears in equivalent form.
-The relative form and the equivalent form are two intimately connected, mutually dependent and
-inseparable elements of the expression of value; but, at the same time, are mutually exclusive,
-antagonistic extremes – i.e., poles of the same expression. They are allotted respectively to the
-two different commodities brought into relation by that expression. It is not possible to express
-the value of linen in linen. 20 yards of linen = 20 yards of linen is no expression of value. On the
-contrary, such an equation merely says that 20 yards of linen are nothing else than 20 yards of
-linen, a definite quantity of the use value linen. The value of the linen can therefore be expressed
-only relatively – i.e., in some other commodity. The relative form of the value of the linen
-presupposes, therefore, the presence of some other commodity – here the coat – under the form of
-an equivalent. On the other hand, the commodity that figures as the equivalent cannot at the same
-time assume the relative form. That second commodity is not the one whose value is expressed.
-Its function is merely to serve as the material in which the value of the first commodity is
-expressed.
-No doubt, the expression 20 yards of linen = 1 coat, or 20 yards of linen are worth 1 coat, implies
-the opposite relation. 1 coat = 20 yards of linen, or 1 coat is worth 20 yards of linen. But, in that
-case, I must reverse the equation, in order to express the value of the coat relatively; and so soon
-as I do that the linen becomes the equivalent instead of the coat. A single commodity cannot,
-therefore, simultaneously assume, in the same expression of value, both forms. The very polarity
-of these forms makes them mutually exclusive.
-Whether, then, a commodity assumes the relative form, or the opposite equivalent form, depends
-entirely upon its accidental position in the expression of value – that is, upon whether it is the
-commodity whose value is being expressed or the commodity in which value is being expressed.
-2. The Relative Form of value
-(a.) The nature and import of this form
-In order to discover how the elementary expression of the value of a commodity lies hidden in the
-value relation of two commodities, we must, in the first place, consider the latter entirely apart
-from its quantitative aspect. The usual mode of procedure is generally the reverse, and in the
-35 Chapter 1
-value relation nothing is seen but the proportion between definite quantities of two different sorts
-of commodities that are considered equal to each other. It is apt to be forgotten that the
-magnitudes of different things can be compared quantitatively, only when those magnitudes are
-expressed in terms of the same unit. It is only as expressions of such a unit that they are of the
-same denomination, and therefore commensurable.17
-Whether 20 yards of linen = 1 coat or = 20 coats or = x coats – that is, whether a given quantity of
-linen is worth few or many coats, every such statement implies that the linen and coats, as
-magnitudes of value, are expressions of the same unit, things of the same kind. Linen = coat is the
-basis of the equation.
-But the two commodities whose identity of quality is thus assumed, do not play the same part. It
-is only the value of the linen that is expressed. And how? By its reference to the coat as its
-equivalent, as something that can be exchanged for it. In this relation the coat is the mode of
-existence of value, is value embodied, for only as such is it the same as the linen. On the other
-hand, the linen’s own value comes to the front, receives independent expression, for it is only as
-being value that it is comparable with the coat as a thing of equal value, or exchangeable with the
-coat. To borrow an illustration from chemistry, butyric acid is a different substance from propyl
-formate. Yet both are made up of the same chemical substances, carbon (C), hydrogen (H), and
-oxygen (O), and that, too, in like proportions – namely, C4H8O2. If now we equate butyric acid to
-propyl formate, then, in the first place, propyl formate would be, in this relation, merely a form of
-existence of C4H8O2 ; and in the second place, we should be stating that butyric acid also consists
-of C4H8O2 . Therefore, by thus equating the two substances, expression would be given to their
-chemical composition, while their different physical forms would be neglected.
-If we say that, as values, commodities are mere congelations of human labour, we reduce them by
-our analysis, it is true, to the abstraction, value; but we ascribe to this value no form apart from
-their bodily form. It is otherwise in the value relation of one commodity to another. Here, the one
-stands forth in its character of value by reason of its relation to the other.
-By making the coat the equivalent of the linen, we equate the labour embodied in the former to
-that in the latter. Now, it is true that the tailoring, which makes the coat, is concrete labour of a
-different sort from the weaving which makes the linen. But the act of equating it to the weaving,
-reduces the tailoring to that which is really equal in the two kinds of labour, to their common
-character of human labour. In this roundabout way, then, the fact is expressed, that weaving also,
-in so far as it weaves value, has nothing to distinguish it from tailoring, and, consequently, is
-abstract human labour. It is the expression of equivalence between different sorts of commodities
-that alone brings into relief the specific character of value-creating labour, and this it does by
-actually reducing the different varieties of labour embodied in the different kinds of commodities
-to their common quality of human labour in the abstract.18
-There is, however, something else required beyond the expression of the specific character of the
-labour of which the value of the linen consists. Human labour power in motion, or human labour,
-creates value, but is not itself value. It becomes value only in its congealed state, when embodied
-in the form of some object. In order to express the value of the linen as a congelation of human
-labour, that value must be expressed as having objective existence, as being a something
-materially different from the linen itself, and yet a something common to the linen and all other
-commodities. The problem is already solved.
-When occupying the position of equivalent in the equation of value, the coat ranks qualitatively
-as the equal of the linen, as something of the same kind, because it is value. In this position it is a
-thing in which we see nothing but value, or whose palpable bodily form represents value. Yet the
-coat itself, the body of the commodity, coat, is a mere use value. A coat as such no more tells us it
-36 Chapter 1
-is value, than does the first piece of linen we take hold of. This shows that when placed in value-
-relation to the linen, the coat signifies more than when out of that relation, just as many a man
-strutting about in a gorgeous uniform counts for more than when in mufti.
-In the production of the coat, human labour power, in the shape of tailoring, must have been
-actually expended. Human labour is therefore accumulated in it. In this aspect the coat is a
-depository of value, but though worn to a thread, it does not let this fact show through. And as
-equivalent of the linen in the value equation, it exists under this aspect alone, counts therefore as
-embodied value, as a body that is value. A, for instance, cannot be “your majesty” to B, unless at
-the same time majesty in B’s eyes assumes the bodily form of A, and, what is more, with every
-new father of the people, changes its features, hair, and many other things besides.
-Hence, in the value equation, in which the coat is the equivalent of the linen, the coat officiates as
-the form of value. The value of the commodity linen is expressed by the bodily form of the
-commodity coat, the value of one by the use value of the other. As a use value, the linen is
-something palpably different from the coat; as value, it is the same as the coat, and now has the
-appearance of a coat. Thus the linen acquires a value form different from its physical form. The
-fact that it is value, is made manifest by its equality with the coat, just as the sheep’s nature of a
-Christian is shown in his resemblance to the Lamb of God.
-We see, then, all that our analysis of the value of commodities has already told us, is told us by
-the linen itself, so soon as it comes into communication with another commodity, the coat. Only it
-betrays its thoughts in that language with which alone it is familiar, the language of commodities.
-In order to tell us that its own value is created by labour in its abstract character of human labour,
-it says that the coat, in so far as it is worth as much as the linen, and therefore is value, consists of
-the same labour as the linen. In order to inform us that its sublime reality as value is not the same
-as its buckram body, it says that value has the appearance of a coat, and consequently that so far
-as the linen is value, it and the coat are as like as two peas. We may here remark, that the
-language of commodities has, besides Hebrew, many other more or less correct dialects. The
-German “Wertsein,” to be worth, for instance, expresses in a less striking manner than the
-Romance verbs “valere,” “valer,” “valoir,” that the equating of commodity B to commodity A, is
-commodity A’s own mode of expressing its value. Paris vaut bien une messe. [Paris is certainly
-worth a mass]
-By means, therefore, of the value-relation expressed in our equation, the bodily form of
-commodity B becomes the value form of commodity A, or the body of commodity B acts as a
-mirror to the value of commodity A.19 By putting itself in relation with commodity B, as value in
-propriâ personâ, as the matter of which human labour is made up, the commodity A converts the
-value in use, B, into the substance in which to express its, A’s, own value. The value of A, thus
-expressed in the use value of B, has taken the form of relative value.
-(b.) Quantitative determination of Relative value
-Every commodity, whose value it is intended to express, is a useful object of given quantity, as 15
-bushels of corn, or 100 lbs of coffee. And a given quantity of any commodity contains a definite
-quantity of human labour. The value form must therefore not only express value generally, but
-also value in definite quantity. Therefore, in the value relation of commodity A to commodity B,
-of the linen to the coat, not only is the latter, as value in general, made the equal in quality of the
-linen, but a definite quantity of coat (1 coat) is made the equivalent of a definite quantity (20
-yards) of linen.
-The equation, 20 yards of linen = 1 coat, or 20 yards of linen are worth one coat, implies that the
-same quantity of value substance (congealed labour) is embodied in both; that the two
-37 Chapter 1
-commodities have each cost the same amount of labour of the same quantity of labour time. But
-the labour time necessary for the production of 20 yards of linen or 1 coat varies with every
-change in the productiveness of weaving or tailoring. We have now to consider the influence of
-such changes on the quantitative aspect of the relative expression of value.
-I. Let the value of the linen vary,20 that of the coat remaining constant. If, say in consequence
-of the exhaustion of flax-growing soil, the labour time necessary for the production of the linen
-be doubled, the value of the linen will also be doubled. Instead of the equation, 20 yards of linen
-= 1 coat, we should have 20 yards of linen = 2 coats, since 1 coat would now contain only half the
-labour time embodied in 20 yards of linen. If, on the other hand, in consequence, say, of
-improved looms, this labour time be reduced by one-half, the value of the linen would fall by
-one-half. Consequently, we should have 20 yards of linen = ½ coat. The relative value of
-commodity A, i.e., its value expressed in commodity B, rises and falls directly as the value of A,
-the value of B being supposed constant.
-II. Let the value of the linen remain constant, while the value of the coat varies. If, under
-these circumstances, in consequence, for instance, of a poor crop of wool, the labour time
-necessary for the production of a coat becomes doubled, we have instead of 20 yards of linen = 1
-coat, 20 yards of linen = ½ coat. If, on the other hand, the value of the coat sinks by one-half, then
-20 yards of linen = 2 coats. Hence, if the value of commodity A remain constant, its relative value
-expressed in commodity B rises and falls inversely as the value of B.
-If we compare the different cases in I and II, we see that the same change of magnitude in relative
-value may arise from totally opposite causes. Thus, the equation, 20 yards of linen = 1 coat,
-becomes 20 yards of linen = 2 coats, either, because the value of the linen has doubled, or
-because the value of the coat has fallen by one-half; and it becomes 20 yards of linen = ½ coat,
-either, because the value of the linen has fallen by one-half, or because the value of the coat has
-doubled.
-III. Let the quantities of labour time respectively necessary for the production of the linen and
-the coat vary simultaneously in the same direction and in the same proportion. In this case 20
-yards of linen continue equal to 1 coat, however much their values may have altered. Their
-change of value is seen as soon as they are compared with a third commodity, whose value has
-remained constant. If the values of all commodities rose or fell simultaneously, and in the same
-proportion, their relative values would remain unaltered. Their real change of value would appear
-from the diminished or increased quantity of commodities produced in a given time.
-IV. The labour time respectively necessary for the production of the linen and the coat, and
-therefore the value of these commodities may simultaneously vary in the same direction, but at
-unequal rates or in opposite directions, or in other ways. The effect of all these possible different
-variations, on the relative value of a commodity, may be deduced from the results of I, II, and III.
-Thus real changes in the magnitude of value are neither unequivocally nor exhaustively reflected
-in their relative expression, that is, in the equation expressing the magnitude of relative value. The
-relative value of a commodity may vary, although its value remains constant. Its relative value
-may remain constant, although its value varies; and finally, simultaneous variations in the
-magnitude of value and in that of its relative expression by no means necessarily correspond in
-amount.21
-3. The Equivalent form of value
-We have seen that commodity A (the linen), by expressing its value in the use value of a
-commodity differing in kind (the coat), at the same time impresses upon the latter a specific form
-38 Chapter 1
-of value, namely that of the equivalent. The commodity linen manifests its quality of having a
-value by the fact that the coat, without having assumed a value form different from its bodily
-form, is equated to the linen. The fact that the latter therefore has a value is expressed by saying
-that the coat is directly exchangeable with it. Therefore, when we say that a commodity is in the
-equivalent form, we express the fact that it is directly exchangeable with other commodities.
-When one commodity, such as a coat, serves as the equivalent of another, such as linen, and coats
-consequently acquire the characteristic property of being directly exchangeable with linen, we are
-far from knowing in what proportion the two are exchangeable. The value of the linen being
-given in magnitude, that proportion depends on the value of the coat. Whether the coat serves as
-the equivalent and the linen as relative value, or the linen as the equivalent and the coat as relative
-value, the magnitude of the coat’s value is determined, independently of its value form, by the
-labour time necessary for its production. But whenever the coat assumes in the equation of value,
-the position of equivalent, its value acquires no quantitative expression; on the contrary, the
-commodity coat now figures only as a definite quantity of some article.
-For instance, 40 yards of linen are worth – what? 2 coats. Because the commodity coat here plays
-the part of equivalent, because the use-value coat, as opposed to the linen, figures as an
-embodiment of value, therefore a definite number of coats suffices to express the definite quantity
-of value in the linen. Two coats may therefore express the quantity of value of 40 yards of linen,
-but they can never express the quantity of their own value. A superficial observation of this fact,
-namely, that in the equation of value, the equivalent figures exclusively as a simple quantity of
-some article, of some use value, has misled Bailey, as also many others, both before and after
-him, into seeing, in the expression of value, merely a quantitative relation. The truth being, that
-when a commodity acts as equivalent, no quantitative determination of its value is expressed.
-The first peculiarity that strikes us, in considering the form of the equivalent, is this: use value
-becomes the form of manifestation, the phenomenal form of its opposite, value.
-The bodily form of the commodity becomes its value form. But, mark well, that this quid pro quo
-exists in the case of any commodity B, only when some other commodity A enters into a value
-relation with it, and then only within the limits of this relation. Since no commodity can stand in
-the relation of equivalent to itself, and thus turn its own bodily shape into the expression of its
-own value, every commodity is compelled to choose some other commodity for its equivalent,
-and to accept the use value, that is to say, the bodily shape of that other commodity as the form of
-its own value.
-One of the measures that we apply to commodities as material substances, as use values, will
-serve to illustrate this point. A sugar-loaf being a body, is heavy, and therefore has weight: but we
-can neither see nor touch this weight. We then take various pieces of iron, whose weight has been
-determined beforehand. The iron, as iron, is no more the form of manifestation of weight, than is
-the sugar-loaf. Nevertheless, in order to express the sugar-loaf as so much weight, we put it into a
-weight-relation with the iron. In this relation, the iron officiates as a body representing nothing
-but weight. A certain quantity of iron therefore serves as the measure of the weight of the sugar,
-and represents, in relation to the sugar-loaf, weight embodied, the form of manifestation of
-weight. This part is played by the iron only within this relation, into which the sugar or any other
-body, whose weight has to be determined, enters with the iron. Were they not both heavy, they
-could not enter into this relation, and the one could therefore not serve as the expression of the
-weight of the other. When we throw both into the scales, we see in reality, that as weight they are
-both the same, and that, therefore, when taken in proper proportions, they have the same weight.
-Just as the substance iron, as a measure of weight, represents in relation to the sugar-loaf weight
-39 Chapter 1
-alone, so, in our expression of value, the material object, coat, in relation to the linen, represents
-value alone.
-Here, however, the analogy ceases. The iron, in the expression of the weight of the sugar-loaf,
-represents a natural property common to both bodies, namely their weight; but the coat, in the
-expression of value of the linen, represents a non-natural property of both, something purely
-social, namely, their value.
-Since the relative form of value of a commodity – the linen, for example – expresses the value of
-that commodity, as being something wholly different from its substance and properties, as being,
-for instance, coat-like, we see that this expression itself indicates that some social relation lies at
-the bottom of it. With the equivalent form it is just the contrary. The very essence of this form is
-that the material commodity itself – the coat – just as it is, expresses value, and is endowed with
-the form of value by Nature itself. Of course this holds good only so long as the value relation
-exists, in which the coat stands in the position of equivalent to the linen.22 Since, however, the
-properties of a thing are not the result of its relations to other things, but only manifest themselves
-in such relations, the coat seems to be endowed with its equivalent form, its property of being
-directly exchangeable, just as much by Nature as it is endowed with the property of being heavy,
-or the capacity to keep us warm. Hence the enigmatical character of the equivalent form which
-escapes the notice of the bourgeois political economist, until this form, completely developed,
-confronts him in the shape of money. He then seeks to explain away the mystical character of
-gold and silver, by substituting for them less dazzling commodities, and by reciting, with ever
-renewed satisfaction, the catalogue of all possible commodities which at one time or another have
-played the part of equivalent. He has not the least suspicion that the most simple expression of
-value, such as 20 yds of linen = 1 coat, already propounds the riddle of the equivalent form for
-our solution.
-The body of the commodity that serves as the equivalent, figures as the materialisation of human
-labour in the abstract, and is at the same time the product of some specifically useful concrete
-labour. This concrete labour becomes, therefore, the medium for expressing abstract human
-labour. If on the one hand the coat ranks as nothing but the embodiment of abstract human labour,
-so, on the other hand, the tailoring which is actually embodied in it, counts as nothing but the
-form under which that abstract labour is realised. In the expression of value of the linen, the
-utility of the tailoring consists, not in making clothes, but in making an object, which we at once
-recognise to be Value, and therefore to be a congelation of labour, but of labour indistinguishable
-from that realised in the value of the linen. In order to act as such a mirror of value, the labour of
-tailoring must reflect nothing besides its own abstract quality of being human labour generally.
-In tailoring, as well as in weaving, human labour power is expended. Both, therefore, possess the
-general property of being human labour, and may, therefore, in certain cases, such as in the
-production of value, have to be considered under this aspect alone. There is nothing mysterious in
-this. But in the expression of value there is a complete turn of the tables. For instance, how is the
-fact to be expressed that weaving creates the value of the linen, not by virtue of being weaving, as
-such, but by reason of its general property of being human labour? Simply by opposing to
-weaving that other particular form of concrete labour (in this instance tailoring), which produces
-the equivalent of the product of weaving. Just as the coat in its bodily form became a direct
-expression of value, so now does tailoring, a concrete form of labour, appear as the direct and
-palpable embodiment of human labour generally.
-Hence, the second peculiarity of the equivalent form is, that concrete labour becomes the form
-under which its opposite, abstract human labour, manifests itself.
-40 Chapter 1
-But because this concrete labour, tailoring in our case, ranks as, and is directly identified with,
-undifferentiated human labour, it also ranks as identical with any other sort of labour, and
-therefore with that embodied in the linen. Consequently, although, like all other commodity-
-producing labour, it is the labour of private individuals, yet, at the same time, it ranks as labour
-directly social in its character. This is the reason why it results in a product directly exchangeable
-with other commodities. We have then a third peculiarity of the equivalent form, namely, that the
-labour of private individuals takes the form of its opposite, labour directly social in its form.
-The two latter peculiarities of the equivalent form will become more intelligible if we go back to
-the great thinker who was the first to analyse so many forms, whether of thought, society, or
-Nature, and amongst them also the form of value. I mean Aristotle.
-In the first place, he clearly enunciates that the money form of commodities is only the further
-development of the simple form of value – i.e., of the expression of the value of one commodity
-in some other commodity taken at random; for he says:
-5 beds = 1 house (κλῖναι πέντε ἀντὶ οἰκίας)
-is not to be distinguished from
-5 beds = so much money. (κλῖναι πέντε ἀντὶ ... ὅσου αἱ πέντε κλῖναι)
-He further sees that the value relation which gives rise to this expression makes it necessary that
-the house should qualitatively be made the equal of the bed, and that, without such an
-equalisation, these two clearly different things could not be compared with each other as
-commensurable quantities. “Exchange,” he says, “cannot take place without equality, and
-equality not without commensurability". (οὔτ᾿ ἰσότης μὴ οὔσης συμμετρίας). Here, however, he
-comes to a stop, and gives up the further analysis of the form of value. “It is, however, in reality,
-impossible (τῇ μὲν οὖν ἀληθείᾳ ἀδύνατον), that such unlike things can be commensurable” – i.e.,
-qualitatively equal. Such an equalisation can only be something foreign to their real nature,
-consequently only “a makeshift for practical purposes.”
-Aristotle therefore, himself, tells us what barred the way to his further analysis; it was the absence
-of any concept of value. What is that equal something, that common substance, which admits of
-the value of the beds being expressed by a house? Such a thing, in truth, cannot exist, says
-Aristotle. And why not? Compared with the beds, the house does represent something equal to
-them, in so far as it represents what is really equal, both in the beds and the house. And that is –
-human labour.
-There was, however, an important fact which prevented Aristotle from seeing that, to attribute
-value to commodities, is merely a mode of expressing all labour as equal human labour, and
-consequently as labour of equal quality. Greek society was founded upon slavery, and had,
-therefore, for its natural basis, the inequality of men and of their labour powers. The secret of the
-expression of value, namely, that all kinds of labour are equal and equivalent, because, and so far
-as they are human labour in general, cannot be deciphered, until the notion of human equality has
-already acquired the fixity of a popular prejudice. This, however, is possible only in a society in
-which the great mass of the produce of labour takes the form of commodities, in which,
-consequently, the dominant relation between man and man, is that of owners of commodities. The
-brilliancy of Aristotle’s genius is shown by this alone, that he discovered, in the expression of the
-value of commodities, a relation of equality. The peculiar conditions of the society in which he
-lived, alone prevented him from discovering what, “in truth,” was at the bottom of this equality.
-4. The Elementary Form of value considered as a whole
-The elementary form of value of a commodity is contained in the equation, expressing its value
-relation to another commodity of a different kind, or in its exchange relation to the same. The
-41 Chapter 1
-value of commodity A, is qualitatively expressed, by the fact that commodity B is directly
-exchangeable with it. Its value is quantitatively expressed by the fact, that a definite quantity of B
-is exchangeable with a definite quantity of A. In other words, the value of a commodity obtains
-independent and definite expression, by taking the form of exchange value. When, at the
-beginning of this chapter, we said, in common parlance, that a commodity is both a use value and
-an exchange value, we were, accurately speaking, wrong. A commodity is a use value or object of
-utility, and a value. It manifests itself as this two-fold thing, that it is, as soon as its value assumes
-an independent form – viz., the form of exchange value. It never assumes this form when isolated,
-but only when placed in a value or exchange relation with another commodity of a different kind.
-When once we know this, such a mode of expression does no harm; it simply serves as an
-abbreviation.
-Our analysis has shown, that the form or expression of the value of a commodity originates in the
-nature of value, and not that value and its magnitude originate in the mode of their expression as
-exchange value. This, however, is the delusion as well of the mercantilists and their recent
-revivers, Ferrier, Ganilh,23 and others, as also of their antipodes, the modern bagmen of Free-
-trade, such as Bastiat. The mercantilists lay special stress on the qualitative aspect of the
-expression of value, and consequently on the equivalent form of commodities, which attains its
-full perfection in money. The modern hawkers of Free-trade, who must get rid of their article at
-any price, on the other hand, lay most stress on the quantitative aspect of the relative form of
-value. For them there consequently exists neither value, nor magnitude of value, anywhere except
-in its expression by means of the exchange relation of commodities, that is, in the daily list of
-prices current. Macleod, who has taken upon himself to dress up the confused ideas of Lombard
-Street in the most learned finery, is a successful cross between the superstitious mercantilists, and
-the enlightened Free-trade bagmen.
-A close scrutiny of the expression of the value of A in terms of B, contained in the equation
-expressing the value relation of A to B, has shown us that, within that relation, the bodily form of
-A figures only as a use value, the bodily form of B only as the form or aspect of value. The
-opposition or contrast existing internally in each commodity between use value and value, is,
-therefore, made evident externally by two commodities being placed in such relation to each
-other, that the commodity whose value it is sought to express, figures directly as a mere use
-value, while the commodity in which that value is to be expressed, figures directly as mere
-exchange value. Hence the elementary form of value of a commodity is the elementary form in
-which the contrast contained in that commodity, between use value and value, becomes apparent.
-Every product of labour is, in all states of society, a use value; but it is only at a definite historical
-epoch in a society’s development that such a product becomes a commodity, viz., at the epoch
-when the labour spent on the production of a useful article becomes expressed as one of the
-objective qualities of that article, i.e., as its value. It therefore follows that the elementary value
-form is also the primitive form under which a product of labour appears historically as a
-commodity, and that the gradual transformation of such products into commodities, proceeds pari
-passu with the development of the value form.
-We perceive, at first sight, the deficiencies of the elementary form of value: it is a mere germ,
-which must undergo a series of metamorphoses before it can ripen into the price form.
-The expression of the value of commodity A in terms of any other commodity B, merely
-distinguishes the value from the use value of A, and therefore places A merely in a relation of
-exchange with a single different commodity, B; but it is still far from expressing A’s qualitative
-equality, and quantitative proportionality, to all commodities. To the elementary relative value
-form of a commodity, there corresponds the single equivalent form of one other commodity.
-42 Chapter 1
-Thus, in the relative expression of value of the linen, the coat assumes the form of equivalent, or
-of being directly exchangeable, only in relation to a single commodity, the linen.
-Nevertheless, the elementary form of value passes by an easy transition into a more complete
-form. It is true that by means of the elementary form, the value of a commodity A, becomes
-expressed in terms of one, and only one, other commodity. But that one may be a commodity of
-any kind, coat, iron, corn, or anything else. Therefore, according as A is placed in relation with
-one or the other, we get for one and the same commodity, different elementary expressions of
-value.24 The number of such possible expressions is limited only by the number of the different
-kinds of commodities distinct from it. The isolated expression of A’s value, is therefore
-convertible into a series, prolonged to any length, of the different elementary expressions of that
-value.
-B. Total or Expanded Form of value
-z Com. A = u Com. B or = v Com. C or = w Com. D or = Com. E or = &c.
-(20 yards of linen = 1 coat or = 10 lbs tea or = 40 lbs. coffee or
-= 1 quarter corn or = 2 ounces gold or = ½ ton iron or = &c.)
-1. The Expanded Relative form of value
-The value of a single commodity, the linen, for example, is now expressed in terms of numberless
-other elements of the world of commodities. Every other commodity now becomes a mirror of the
-linen’s value.25 It is thus, that for the first time, this value shows itself in its true light as a
-congelation of undifferentiated human labour. For the labour that creates it, now stands expressly
-revealed, as labour that ranks equally with every other sort of human labour, no matter what its
-form, whether tailoring, ploughing, mining, &c., and no matter, therefore, whether it is realised in
-coats, corn, iron, or gold. The linen, by virtue of the form of its value, now stands in a social
-relation, no longer with only one other kind of commodity, but with the whole world of
-commodities. As a commodity, it is a citizen of that world. At the same time, the interminable
-series of value equations implies, that as regards the value of a commodity, it is a matter of
-indifference under what particular form, or kind, of use value it appears.
-In the first form, 20 yds of linen = 1 coat, it might, for ought that otherwise appears, be pure
-accident, that these two commodities are exchangeable in definite quantities. In the second form,
-on the contrary, we perceive at once the background that determines, and is essentially different
-from, this accidental appearance. The value of the linen remains unaltered in magnitude, whether
-expressed in coats, coffee, or iron, or in numberless different commodities, the property of as
-many different owners. The accidental relation between two individual commodity-owners
-disappears. It becomes plain, that it is not the exchange of commodities which regulates the
-magnitude of their value; but, on the contrary, that it is the magnitude of their value which
-controls their exchange proportions.
-2. The particular Equivalent form
-Each commodity, such as, coat, tea, corn, iron, &c., figures in the expression of value of the linen,
-as an equivalent, and, consequently, as a thing that is value. The bodily form of each of these
-commodities figures now as a particular equivalent form, one out of many. In the same way the
-manifold concrete useful kinds of labour, embodied in these different commodities, rank now as
-so many different forms of the realisation, or manifestation, of undifferentiated human labour.
-3. Defects of the Total or Expanded form of value
-In the first place, the relative expression of value is incomplete because the series representing it
-is interminable. The chain of which each equation of value is a link, is liable at any moment to be
-43 Chapter 1
-lengthened by each new kind of commodity that comes into existence and furnishes the material
-for a fresh expression of value. In the second place, it is a many-coloured mosaic of disparate and
-independent expressions of value. And lastly, if, as must be the case, the relative value of each
-commodity in turn, becomes expressed in this expanded form, we get for each of them a relative
-value form, different in every case, and consisting of an interminable series of expressions of
-value. The defects of the expanded relative value form are reflected in the corresponding
-equivalent form. Since the bodily form of each single commodity is one particular equivalent
-form amongst numberless others, we have, on the whole, nothing but fragmentary equivalent
-forms, each excluding the others. In the same way, also, the special, concrete, useful kind of
-labour embodied in each particular equivalent, is presented only as a particular kind of labour,
-and therefore not as an exhaustive representative of human labour generally. The latter, indeed,
-gains adequate manifestation in the totality of its manifold, particular, concrete forms. But, in that
-case, its expression in an infinite series is ever incomplete and deficient in unity.
-The expanded relative value form is, however, nothing but the sum of the elementary relative
-expressions or equations of the first kind, such as:
-20 yards of linen = 1 coat
-20 yards of linen = 10 lbs of tea, etc.
-Each of these implies the corresponding inverted equation,
-1 coat = 20 yards of linen
-10 lbs of tea = 20 yards of linen, etc.
-In fact, when a person exchanges his linen for many other commodities, and thus expresses its
-value in a series of other commodities, it necessarily follows, that the various owners of the latter
-exchange them for the linen, and consequently express the value of their various commodities in
-one and the same third commodity, the linen. If then, we reverse the series, 20 yards of linen = 1
-coat or = 10 lbs of tea, etc., that is to say, if we give expression to the converse relation already
-implied in the series, we get,
-C. The General Form of Value
-1 coat
-10 lbs of tea
-40 lbs of coffee
-1 quarter of corn
-2 ounces of gold
-½ a ton of iron
-x Commodity A, etc.
-= 20 yards of linen
-1. The altered character of the form of value
-All commodities now express their value (1) in an elementary form, because in a single
-commodity; (2) with unity, because in one and the same commodity. This form of value is
-elementary and the same for all, therefore general.
-The forms A and B were fit only to express the value of a commodity as something distinct from
-its use value or material form.
-The first form, A, furnishes such equations as the following: – 1 coat = 20 yards of linen, 10 lbs
-of tea = ½ a ton of iron. The value of the coat is equated to linen, that of the tea to iron. But to be
-equated to linen, and again to iron, is to be as different as are linen and iron. This form, it is plain,
-44 Chapter 1
-occurs practically only in the first beginning, when the products of labour are converted into
-commodities by accidental and occasional exchanges.
-The second form, B, distinguishes, in a more adequate manner than the first, the value of a
-commodity from its use value, for the value of the coat is there placed in contrast under all
-possible shapes with the bodily form of the coat; it is equated to linen, to iron, to tea, in short, to
-everything else, only not to itself, the coat. On the other hand, any general expression of value
-common to all is directly excluded; for, in the equation of value of each commodity, all other
-commodities now appear only under the form of equivalents. The expanded form of value comes
-into actual existence for the first time so soon as a particular product of labour, such as cattle, is
-no longer exceptionally, but habitually, exchanged for various other commodities.
-The third and lastly developed form expresses the values of the whole world of commodities in
-terms of a single commodity set apart for the purpose, namely, the linen, and thus represents to us
-their values by means of their equality with linen. The value of every commodity is now, by
-being equated to linen, not only differentiated from its own use value, but from all other use
-values generally, and is, by that very fact, expressed as that which is common to all commodities.
-By this form, commodities are, for the first time, effectively brought into relation with one
-another as values, or made to appear as exchange values.
-The two earlier forms either express the value of each commodity in terms of a single commodity
-of a different kind, or in a series of many such commodities. In both cases, it is, so to say, the
-special business of each single commodity to find an expression for its value, and this it does
-without the help of the others. These others, with respect to the former, play the passive parts of
-equivalents. The general form of value, C, results from the joint action of the whole world of
-commodities, and from that alone. A commodity can acquire a general expression of its value
-only by all other commodities, simultaneously with it, expressing their values in the same
-equivalent; and every new commodity must follow suit. It thus becomes evident that since the
-existence of commodities as values is purely social, this social existence can be expressed by the
-totality of their social relations alone, and consequently that the form of their value must be a
-socially recognised form.
-All commodities being equated to linen now appear not only as qualitatively equal as values
-generally, but also as values whose magnitudes are capable of comparison. By expressing the
-magnitudes of their values in one and the same material, the linen, those magnitudes are also
-compared with each other. For instance, 10 lbs of tea = 20 yards of linen, and 40 lbs of coffee =
-20 yards of linen. Therefore, 10 lbs of tea = 40 lbs of coffee. In other words, there is contained in
-1 lb of coffee only one-fourth as much substance of value – labour – as is contained in 1 lb of tea.
-The general form of relative value, embracing the whole world of commodities, converts the
-single commodity that is excluded from the rest, and made to play the part of equivalent – here
-the linen – into the universal equivalent. The bodily form of the linen is now the form assumed in
-common by the values of all commodities; it therefore becomes directly exchangeable with all
-and every of them. The substance linen becomes the visible incarnation, the social chrysalis state
-of every kind of human labour. Weaving, which is the labour of certain private individuals
-producing a particular article, linen, acquires in consequence a social character, the character of
-equality with all other kinds of labour. The innumerable equations of which the general form of
-value is composed, equate in turn the labour embodied in the linen to that embodied in every
-other commodity, and they thus convert weaving into the general form of manifestation of
-undifferentiated human labour. In this manner the labour realised in the values of commodities is
-presented not only under its negative aspect, under which abstraction is made from every concrete
-form and useful property of actual work, but its own positive nature is made to reveal itself
-45 Chapter 1
-expressly. The general value form is the reduction of all kinds of actual labour to their common
-character of being human labour generally, of being the expenditure of human labour power.
-The general value form, which represents all products of labour as mere congelations of
-undifferentiated human labour, shows by its very structure that it is the social resumé of the world
-of commodities. That form consequently makes it indisputably evident that in the world of
-commodities the character possessed by all labour of being human labour constitutes its specific
-social character.
-2. The Interdependent Development of the Relative Form of Value, and of
-the Equivalent Form
-The degree of development of the relative form of value corresponds to that of the equivalent
-form. But we must bear in mind that the development of the latter is only the expression and
-result of the development of the former.
-The primary or isolated relative form of value of one commodity converts some other commodity
-into an isolated equivalent. The expanded form of relative value, which is the expression of the
-value of one commodity in terms of all other commodities, endows those other commodities with
-the character of particular equivalents differing in kind. And lastly, a particular kind of
-commodity acquires the character of universal equivalent, because all other commodities make it
-the material in which they uniformly express their value.
-The antagonism between the relative form of value and the equivalent form, the two poles of the
-value form, is developed concurrently with that form itself.
-The first form, 20 yds of linen = one coat, already contains this antagonism, without as yet fixing
-it. According as we read this equation forwards or backwards, the parts played by the linen and
-the coat are different. In the one case the relative value of the linen is expressed in the coat, in the
-other case the relative value of the coat is expressed in the linen. In this first form of value,
-therefore, it is difficult to grasp the polar contrast.
-Form B shows that only one single commodity at a time can completely expand its relative value,
-and that it acquires this expanded form only because, and in so far as, all other commodities are,
-with respect to it, equivalents. Here we cannot reverse the equation, as we can the equation 20 yds
-of linen = 1 coat, without altering its general character, and converting it from the expanded form
-of value into the general form of value.
-Finally, the form C gives to the world of commodities a general social relative form of value,
-because, and in so far as, thereby all commodities, with the exception of one, are excluded from
-the equivalent form. A single commodity, the linen, appears therefore to have acquired the
-character of direct exchangeability with every other commodity because, and in so far as, this
-character is denied to every other commodity.26
-The commodity that figures as universal equivalent, is, on the other hand, excluded from the
-relative value form. If the linen, or any other commodity serving as universal equivalent, were, at
-the same time, to share in the relative form of value, it would have to serve as its own equivalent.
-We should then have 20 yds of linen = 20 yds of linen; this tautology expresses neither value, nor
-magnitude of value. In order to express the relative value of the universal equivalent, we must
-rather reverse the form C. This equivalent has no relative form of value in common with other
-commodities, but its value is relatively expressed by a never ending series of other commodities.
-Thus, the expanded form of relative value, or form B, now shows itself as the specific form of
-relative value for the equivalent commodity.
-46 Chapter 1
-3. Transition from the General form of value to the Money form
-The universal equivalent form is a form of value in general. It can, therefore, be assumed by any
-commodity. On the other hand, if a commodity be found to have assumed the universal
-equivalent form (form C), this is only because and in so far as it has been excluded from the rest
-of all other commodities as their equivalent, and that by their own act. And from the moment that
-this exclusion becomes finally restricted to one particular commodity, from that moment only, the
-general form of relative value of the world of commodities obtains real consistence and general
-social validity.
-The particular commodity, with whose bodily form the equivalent form is thus socially identified,
-now becomes the money commodity, or serves as money. It becomes the special social function
-of that commodity, and consequently its social monopoly, to play within the world of
-commodities the part of the universal equivalent. Amongst the commodities which, in form B,
-figure as particular equivalents of the linen, and, in form C, express in common their relative
-values in linen, this foremost place has been attained by one in particular – namely, gold. If, then,
-in form C we replace the linen by gold, we get,
-D. The Money-Form
-20 yards of linen =
-1 coat =
-10 lbs of tea =
-40 lbs of coffee =
-1 quarter of corn =
-½ a ton of iron =
-x Commodity A =
-= 2 ounces of gold
-In passing from form A to form B, and from the latter to form C, the changes are fundamental. On
-the other hand, there is no difference between forms C and D, except that, in the latter, gold has
-assumed the equivalent form in the place of linen. Gold is in form D, what linen was in form C –
-the universal equivalent. The progress consists in this alone, that the character of direct and
-universal exchangeability – in other words, that the universal equivalent form – has now, by
-social custom, become finally identified with the substance, gold.
-Gold is now money with reference to all other commodities only because it was previously, with
-reference to them, a simple commodity. Like all other commodities, it was also capable of serving
-as an equivalent, either as simple equivalent in isolated exchanges, or as particular equivalent by
-the side of others. Gradually it began to serve, within varying limits, as universal equivalent. So
-soon as it monopolises this position in the expression of value for the world of commodities, it
-becomes the money commodity, and then, and not till then, does form D become distinct from
-form C, and the general form of value become changed into the money form.
-The elementary expression of the relative value of a single commodity, such as linen, in terms of
-the commodity, such as gold, that plays the part of money, is the price form of that commodity.
-The price form of the linen is therefore
-20 yards of linen = 2 ounces of gold, or, if 2 ounces of gold when
-coined are £2, 20 yards of linen = £2.
-The difficulty in forming a concept of the money form, consists in clearly comprehending the
-universal equivalent form, and as a necessary corollary, the general form of value, form C. The
-47 Chapter 1
-latter is deducible from form B, the expanded form of value, the essential component element of
-which, we saw, is form A, 20 yards of linen = 1 coat or x commodity A = y commodity B. The
-simple commodity form is therefore the germ of the money form.
-Section 4: The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret
-Thereof
-A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows
-that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological
-niceties. So far as it is a value in use, there is nothing mysterious about it, whether we consider it
-from the point of view that by its properties it is capable of satisfying human wants, or from the
-point that those properties are the product of human labour. It is as clear as noon-day, that man,
-by his industry, changes the forms of the materials furnished by Nature, in such a way as to make
-them useful to him. The form of wood, for instance, is altered, by making a table out of it. Yet,
-for all that, the table continues to be that common, every-day thing, wood. But, so soon as it steps
-forth as a commodity, it is changed into something transcendent. It not only stands with its feet on
-the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its
-wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than “table-turning” ever was. 26a
-The mystical character of commodities does not originate, therefore, in their use value. Just as
-little does it proceed from the nature of the determining factors of value. For, in the first place,
-however varied the useful kinds of labour, or productive activities, may be, it is a physiological
-fact, that they are functions of the human organism, and that each such function, whatever may be
-its nature or form, is essentially the expenditure of human brain, nerves, muscles, &c. Secondly,
-with regard to that which forms the ground-work for the quantitative determination of value,
-namely, the duration of that expenditure, or the quantity of labour, it is quite clear that there is a
-palpable difference between its quantity and quality. In all states of society, the labour time that it
-costs to produce the means of subsistence, must necessarily be an object of interest to mankind,
-though not of equal interest in different stages of development.27 And lastly, from the moment
-that men in any way work for one another, their labour assumes a social form.
-Whence, then, arises the enigmatical character of the product of labour, so soon as it assumes the
-form of commodities? Clearly from this form itself. The equality of all sorts of human labour is
-expressed objectively by their products all being equally values; the measure of the expenditure
-of labour power by the duration of that expenditure, takes the form of the quantity of value of the
-products of labour; and finally the mutual relations of the producers, within which the social
-character of their labour affirms itself, take the form of a social relation between the products.
-A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men’s
-labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because
-the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social
-relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour. This is the
-reason why the products of labour become commodities, social things whose qualities are at the
-same time perceptible and imperceptible by the senses. In the same way the light from an object
-is perceived by us not as the subjective excitation of our optic nerve, but as the objective form of
-something outside the eye itself. But, in the act of seeing, there is at all events, an actual passage
-of light from one thing to another, from the external object to the eye. There is a physical relation
-between physical things. But it is different with commodities. There, the existence of the things
-quâ commodities, and the value relation between the products of labour which stamps them as
-commodities, have absolutely no connection with their physical properties and with the material
-48 Chapter 1
-relations arising therefrom. There it is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in
-their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy,
-we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the
-productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering
-into relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with
-the products of men’s hands. This I call the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of
-labour, so soon as they are produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the
-production of commodities.
-This Fetishism of commodities has its origin, as the foregoing analysis has already shown, in the
-peculiar social character of the labour that produces them.
-As a general rule, articles of utility become commodities, only because they are products of the
-labour of private individuals or groups of individuals who carry on their work independently of
-each other. The sum total of the labour of all these private individuals forms the aggregate labour
-of society. Since the producers do not come into social contact with each other until they
-exchange their products, the specific social character of each producer’s labour does not show
-itself except in the act of exchange. In other words, the labour of the individual asserts itself as a
-part of the labour of society, only by means of the relations which the act of exchange establishes
-directly between the products, and indirectly, through them, between the producers. To the latter,
-therefore, the relations connecting the labour of one individual with that of the rest appear, not as
-direct social relations between individuals at work, but as what they really are, material relations
-between persons and social relations between things. It is only by being exchanged that the
-products of labour acquire, as values, one uniform social status, distinct from their varied forms
-of existence as objects of utility. This division of a product into a useful thing and a value
-becomes practically important, only when exchange has acquired such an extension that useful
-articles are produced for the purpose of being exchanged, and their character as values has
-therefore to be taken into account, beforehand, during production. From this moment the labour
-of the individual producer acquires socially a two-fold character. On the one hand, it must, as a
-definite useful kind of labour, satisfy a definite social want, and thus hold its place as part and
-parcel of the collective labour of all, as a branch of a social division of labour that has sprung up
-spontaneously. On the other hand, it can satisfy the manifold wants of the individual producer
-himself, only in so far as the mutual exchangeability of all kinds of useful private labour is an
-established social fact, and therefore the private useful labour of each producer ranks on an
-equality with that of all others. The equalisation of the most different kinds of labour can be the
-result only of an abstraction from their inequalities, or of reducing them to their common
-denominator, viz. expenditure of human labour power or human labour in the abstract. The two-
-fold social character of the labour of the individual appears to him, when reflected in his brain,
-only under those forms which are impressed upon that labour in every-day practice by the
-exchange of products. In this way, the character that his own labour possesses of being socially
-useful takes the form of the condition, that the product must be not only useful, but useful for
-others, and the social character that his particular labour has of being the equal of all other
-particular kinds of labour, takes the form that all the physically different articles that are the
-products of labour, have one common quality, viz., that of having value.
-Hence, when we bring the products of our labour into relation with each other as values, it is not
-because we see in these articles the material receptacles of homogeneous human labour. Quite the
-contrary: whenever, by an exchange, we equate as values our different products, by that very act,
-we also equate, as human labour, the different kinds of labour expended upon them. We are not
-aware of this, nevertheless we do it.28 Value, therefore, does not stalk about with a label
-49 Chapter 1
-describing what it is. It is value, rather, that converts every product into a social hieroglyphic.
-Later on, we try to decipher the hieroglyphic, to get behind the secret of our own social products;
-for to stamp an object of utility as a value, is just as much a social product as language. The
-recent scientific discovery, that the products of labour, so far as they are values, are but material
-expressions of the human labour spent in their production, marks, indeed, an epoch in the history
-of the development of the human race, but, by no means, dissipates the mist through which the
-social character of labour appears to us to be an objective character of the products themselves.
-The fact, that in the particular form of production with which we are dealing, viz., the production
-of commodities, the specific social character of private labour carried on independently, consists
-in the equality of every kind of that labour, by virtue of its being human labour, which character,
-therefore, assumes in the product the form of value – this fact appears to the producers,
-notwithstanding the discovery above referred to, to be just as real and final, as the fact, that, after
-the discovery by science of the component gases of air, the atmosphere itself remained unaltered.
-What, first of all, practically concerns producers when they make an exchange, is the question,
-how much of some other product they get for their own? in what proportions the products are
-exchangeable? When these proportions have, by custom, attained a certain stability, they appear
-to result from the nature of the products, so that, for instance, one ton of iron and two ounces of
-gold appear as naturally to be of equal value as a pound of gold and a pound of iron in spite of
-their different physical and chemical qualities appear to be of equal weight. The character of
-having value, when once impressed upon products, obtains fixity only by reason of their acting
-and re-acting upon each other as quantities of value. These quantities vary continually,
-independently of the will, foresight and action of the producers. To them, their own social action
-takes the form of the action of objects, which rule the producers instead of being ruled by them. It
-requires a fully developed production of commodities before, from accumulated experience
-alone, the scientific conviction springs up, that all the different kinds of private labour, which are
-carried on independently of each other, and yet as spontaneously developed branches of the social
-division of labour, are continually being reduced to the quantitative proportions in which society
-requires them. And why? Because, in the midst of all the accidental and ever fluctuating
-exchange relations between the products, the labour time socially necessary for their production
-forcibly asserts itself like an over-riding law of Nature. The law of gravity thus asserts itself when
-a house falls about our ears.29 The determination of the magnitude of value by labour time is
-therefore a secret, hidden under the apparent fluctuations in the relative values of commodities.
-Its discovery, while removing all appearance of mere accidentality from the determination of the
-magnitude of the values of products, yet in no way alters the mode in which that determination
-takes place.
-Man’s reflections on the forms of social life, and consequently, also, his scientific analysis of
-those forms, take a course directly opposite to that of their actual historical development. He
-begins, post festum, with the results of the process of development ready to hand before him. The
-characters that stamp products as commodities, and whose establishment is a necessary
-preliminary to the circulation of commodities, have already acquired the stability of natural, self-
-understood forms of social life, before man seeks to decipher, not their historical character, for in
-his eyes they are immutable, but their meaning. Consequently it was the analysis of the prices of
-commodities that alone led to the determination of the magnitude of value, and it was the
-common expression of all commodities in money that alone led to the establishment of their
-characters as values. It is, however, just this ultimate money form of the world of commodities
-that actually conceals, instead of disclosing, the social character of private labour, and the social
-relations between the individual producers. When I state that coats or boots stand in a relation to
-50 Chapter 1
-linen, because it is the universal incarnation of abstract human labour, the absurdity of the
-statement is self-evident. Nevertheless, when the producers of coats and boots compare those
-articles with linen, or, what is the same thing, with gold or silver, as the universal equivalent, they
-express the relation between their own private labour and the collective labour of society in the
-same absurd form.
-The categories of bourgeois economy consist of such like forms. They are forms of thought
-expressing with social validity the conditions and relations of a definite, historically determined
-mode of production, viz., the production of commodities. The whole mystery of commodities, all
-the magic and necromancy that surrounds the products of labour as long as they take the form of
-commodities, vanishes therefore, so soon as we come to other forms of production.
-Since Robinson Crusoe’s experiences are a favourite theme with political economists,30 let us
-take a look at him on his island. Moderate though he be, yet some few wants he has to satisfy, and
-must therefore do a little useful work of various sorts, such as making tools and furniture, taming
-goats, fishing and hunting. Of his prayers and the like we take no account, since they are a source
-of pleasure to him, and he looks upon them as so much recreation. In spite of the variety of his
-work, he knows that his labour, whatever its form, is but the activity of one and the same
-Robinson, and consequently, that it consists of nothing but different modes of human labour.
-Necessity itself compels him to apportion his time accurately between his different kinds of work.
-Whether one kind occupies a greater space in his general activity than another, depends on the
-difficulties, greater or less as the case may be, to be overcome in attaining the useful effect aimed
-at. This our friend Robinson soon learns by experience, and having rescued a watch, ledger, and
-pen and ink from the wreck, commences, like a true-born Briton, to keep a set of books. His
-stock-book contains a list of the objects of utility that belong to him, of the operations necessary
-for their production; and lastly, of the labour time that definite quantities of those objects have, on
-an average, cost him. All the relations between Robinson and the objects that form this wealth of
-his own creation, are here so simple and clear as to be intelligible without exertion, even to Mr.
-Sedley Taylor. And yet those relations contain all that is essential to the determination of value.
-Let us now transport ourselves from Robinson’s island bathed in light to the European middle
-ages shrouded in darkness. Here, instead of the independent man, we find everyone dependent,
-serfs and lords, vassals and suzerains, laymen and clergy. Personal dependence here characterises
-the social relations of production just as much as it does the other spheres of life organised on the
-basis of that production. But for the very reason that personal dependence forms the ground-work
-of society, there is no necessity for labour and its products to assume a fantastic form different
-from their reality. They take the shape, in the transactions of society, of services in kind and
-payments in kind. Here the particular and natural form of labour, and not, as in a society based on
-production of commodities, its general abstract form is the immediate social form of labour.
-Compulsory labour is just as properly measured by time, as commodity-producing labour; but
-every serf knows that what he expends in the service of his lord, is a definite quantity of his own
-personal labour power. The tithe to be rendered to the priest is more matter of fact than his
-blessing. No matter, then, what we may think of the parts played by the different classes of people
-themselves in this society, the social relations between individuals in the performance of their
-labour, appear at all events as their own mutual personal relations, and are not disguised under the
-shape of social relations between the products of labour.
-For an example of labour in common or directly associated labour, we have no occasion to go
-back to that spontaneously developed form which we find on the threshold of the history of all
-civilised races.31 We have one close at hand in the patriarchal industries of a peasant family, that
-produces corn, cattle, yarn, linen, and clothing for home use. These different articles are, as
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-regards the family, so many products of its labour, but as between themselves, they are not
-commodities. The different kinds of labour, such as tillage, cattle tending, spinning, weaving and
-making clothes, which result in the various products, are in themselves, and such as they are,
-direct social functions, because functions of the family, which, just as much as a society based on
-the production of commodities, possesses a spontaneously developed system of division of
-labour. The distribution of the work within the family, and the regulation of the labour time of the
-several members, depend as well upon differences of age and sex as upon natural conditions
-varying with the seasons. The labour power of each individual, by its very nature, operates in this
-case merely as a definite portion of the whole labour power of the family, and therefore, the
-measure of the expenditure of individual labour power by its duration, appears here by its very
-nature as a social character of their labour.
-Let us now picture to ourselves, by way of change, a community of free individuals, carrying on
-their work with the means of production in common, in which the labour power of all the
-different individuals is consciously applied as the combined labour power of the community. All
-the characteristics of Robinson’s labour are here repeated, but with this difference, that they are
-social, instead of individual. Everything produced by him was exclusively the result of his own
-personal labour, and therefore simply an object of use for himself. The total product of our
-community is a social product. One portion serves as fresh means of production and remains
-social. But another portion is consumed by the members as means of subsistence. A distribution
-of this portion amongst them is consequently necessary. The mode of this distribution will vary
-with the productive organisation of the community, and the degree of historical development
-attained by the producers. We will assume, but merely for the sake of a parallel with the
-production of commodities, that the share of each individual producer in the means of subsistence
-is determined by his labour time. Labour time would, in that case, play a double part. Its
-apportionment in accordance with a definite social plan maintains the proper proportion between
-the different kinds of work to be done and the various wants of the community. On the other
-hand, it also serves as a measure of the portion of the common labour borne by each individual,
-and of his share in the part of the total product destined for individual consumption. The social
-relations of the individual producers, with regard both to their labour and to its products, are in
-this case perfectly simple and intelligible, and that with regard not only to production but also to
-distribution.
-The religious world is but the reflex of the real world. And for a society based upon the
-production of commodities, in which the producers in general enter into social relations with one
-another by treating their products as commodities and values, whereby they reduce their
-individual private labour to the standard of homogeneous human labour – for such a society,
-Christianity with its cultus of abstract man, more especially in its bourgeois developments,
-Protestantism, Deism, &c., is the most fitting form of religion. In the ancient Asiatic and other
-ancient modes of production, we find that the conversion of products into commodities, and
-therefore the conversion of men into producers of commodities, holds a subordinate place, which,
-however, increases in importance as the primitive communities approach nearer and nearer to
-their dissolution. Trading nations, properly so called, exist in the ancient world only in its
-interstices, like the gods of Epicurus in the Intermundia, or like Jews in the pores of Polish
-society. Those ancient social organisms of production are, as compared with bourgeois society,
-extremely simple and transparent. But they are founded either on the immature development of
-man individually, who has not yet severed the umbilical cord that unites him with his fellowmen
-in a primitive tribal community, or upon direct relations of subjection. They can arise and exist
-only when the development of the productive power of labour has not risen beyond a low stage,
-52 Chapter 1
-and when, therefore, the social relations within the sphere of material life, between man and man,
-and between man and Nature, are correspondingly narrow. This narrowness is reflected in the
-ancient worship of Nature, and in the other elements of the popular religions. The religious reflex
-of the real world can, in any case, only then finally vanish, when the practical relations of every-
-day life offer to man none but perfectly intelligible and reasonable relations with regard to his
-fellowmen and to Nature.
-The life-process of society, which is based on the process of material production, does not strip
-off its mystical veil until it is treated as production by freely associated men, and is consciously
-regulated by them in accordance with a settled plan. This, however, demands for society a certain
-material ground-work or set of conditions of existence which in their turn are the spontaneous
-product of a long and painful process of development.
-Political Economy has indeed analysed, however incompletely,32 value and its magnitude, and
-has discovered what lies beneath these forms. But it has never once asked the question why
-labour is represented by the value of its product and labour time by the magnitude of that value.33
-These formulæ, which bear it stamped upon them in unmistakable letters that they belong to a
-state of society, in which the process of production has the mastery over man, instead of being
-controlled by him, such formulæ appear to the bourgeois intellect to be as much a self-evident
-necessity imposed by Nature as productive labour itself. Hence forms of social production that
-preceded the bourgeois form, are treated by the bourgeoisie in much the same way as the Fathers
-of the Church treated pre-Christian religions.34
-To what extent some economists are misled by the Fetishism inherent in commodities, or by the
-objective appearance of the social characteristics of labour, is shown, amongst other ways, by the
-dull and tedious quarrel over the part played by Nature in the formation of exchange value. Since
-exchange value is a definite social manner of expressing the amount of labour bestowed upon an
-object, Nature has no more to do with it, than it has in fixing the course of exchange.
-The mode of production in which the product takes the form of a commodity, or is produced
-directly for exchange, is the most general and most embryonic form of bourgeois production. It
-therefore makes its appearance at an early date in history, though not in the same predominating
-and characteristic manner as now-a-days. Hence its Fetish character is comparatively easy to be
-seen through. But when we come to more concrete forms, even this appearance of simplicity
-vanishes. Whence arose the illusions of the monetary system? To it gold and silver, when serving
-as money, did not represent a social relation between producers, but were natural objects with
-strange social properties. And modern economy, which looks down with such disdain on the
-monetary system, does not its superstition come out as clear as noon-day, whenever it treats of
-capital? How long is it since economy discarded the physiocratic illusion, that rents grow out of
-the soil and not out of society?
-But not to anticipate, we will content ourselves with yet another example relating to the
-commodity form. Could commodities themselves speak, they would say: Our use value may be a
-thing that interests men. It is no part of us as objects. What, however, does belong to us as
-objects, is our value. Our natural intercourse as commodities proves it. In the eyes of each other
-we are nothing but exchange values. Now listen how those commodities speak through the mouth
-of the economist.
-“Value” – (i.e., exchange value) “is a property of things, riches” – (i.e., use value)
-“of man. Value, in this sense, necessarily implies exchanges, riches do not.”35
-53 Chapter 1
-“Riches” (use value) “are the attribute of men, value is the attribute of
-commodities. A man or a community is rich, a pearl or a diamond is valuable...”
-A pearl or a diamond is valuable as a pearl or a diamond.36
-So far no chemist has ever discovered exchange value either in a pearl or a diamond. The
-economic discoverers of this chemical element, who by-the-bye lay special claim to critical
-acumen, find however that the use value of objects belongs to them independently of their
-material properties, while their value, on the other hand, forms a part of them as objects. What
-confirms them in this view, is the peculiar circumstance that the use value of objects is realised
-without exchange, by means of a direct relation between the objects and man, while, on the other
-hand, their value is realised only by exchange, that is, by means of a social process. Who fails
-here to call to mind our good friend, Dogberry, who informs neighbour Seacoal, that, “To be a
-well-favoured man is the gift of fortune; but reading and writing comes by Nature.”37
-1 Karl Marx, “Zur Kritik der Politischen Oekonomie.” Berlin, 1859, p. 3.
-2 “Desire implies want, it is the appetite of the mind, and as natural as hunger to the body... The
-greatest number (of things) have their value from supplying the wants of the mind.” Nicholas Barbon:
-“A Discourse Concerning Coining the New Money Lighter. In Answer to Mr. Locke’s Considerations,
-&c.”, London, 1696, pp. 2, 3.
-3 “Things have an intrinsick vertue” (this is Barbon’s special term for value in use) “which in all
-places have the same vertue; as the loadstone to attract iron” (l.c., p. 6). The property which the
-magnet possesses of attracting iron, became of use only after by means of that property the polarity of
-the magnet had been discovered.
-4 “The natural worth of anything consists in its fitness to supply the necessities, or serve the
-conveniencies of human life.” (John Locke, “Some Considerations on the Consequences of the
-Lowering of Interest, 1691,” in Works Edit. Lond., 1777, Vol. II., p. 28.) In English writers of the 17th
-century we frequently find “worth” in the sense of value in use, and “value” in the sense of exchange
-value. This is quite in accordance with the spirit of a language that likes to use a Teutonic word for the
-actual thing, and a Romance word for its reflexion.
-5 In bourgeois societies the economic fictio juris prevails, that every one, as a buyer, possesses an
-encyclopedic knowledge of commodities.
-6 “La valeur consiste dans le rapport d’échange qui se trouve entre telle chose et telle autre entre telle
-mesure d’une production et telle mesure d’une autre.” [“Value consists in the exchange relation
-between one thing and another, between a given amount of one product and a given amount of
-another”] (Le Trosne: “De l’Intérêt Social.” Physiocrates, Ed. Daire. Paris, 1846. p. 889.)
-7 “Nothing can have an intrinsick value.” (N. Barbon, l.c., p. 6); or as Butler says – “For what is
-worth in any thing, / But so much money as ’twill bring?” (from Hudibras).
-8 N. Barbon, l.c., p. 53 and 7.
-9 “The value of them (the necessaries of life), when they are exchanged the one for another, is
-regulated by the quantity of labour necessarily required, and commonly taken in producing them.”
-(“Some Thoughts on the Interest of Money in General, and Particularly in the Publick Funds, &c.”
-Lond., p. 36) This remarkable anonymous work written in the last century, bears no date. It is clear,
-however, from internal evidence that it appeared in the reign of George II, about 1739 or 1740.
-10 “Toutes les productions d’un même genre ne forment proprement qu’une masse, dont le prix se
-détermine en général et sans égard aux circonstances particulières.” [“Properly speaking, all products
-of the same kind form a single mass, and their price is determined in general and without regard to
-particular circumstances”] (Le Trosne, l.c., p. 893.)
-54 Chapter 1
-11 K. Marx. l.c., p.6
-* The following passage occurred only in the first edition. “Now we know the substance of
-value. It is labour. We know the measure of its magnitude. It is labour time. The form, which stamps
-value as exchange-value, remains to be analysed. But before this we need to develop the
-characteristics we have already found somewhat more fully.” Taken from the Penguin edition of
-“Capital,” translated by Ben Fowkes.
-12 I am inserting the parenthesis because its omission has often given rise to the misunderstanding that
-every product that is consumed by some one other than its producer is considered in Marx a
-commodity. [Engels, 4th German Edition]
-13 Tutti i fenomeni dell’universo, sieno essi prodotti della mano dell’uomo, ovvero delle universali
-leggi della fisica, non ci danno idea di attuale creazione, ma unicamente di una modificazione della
-materia. Accostare e separare sono gli unici elementi che l’ingegno umano ritrova analizzando l’idea
-della riproduzione: e tanto e riproduzione di valore (value in use, although Verri in this passage of his
-controversy with the Physiocrats is not himself quite certain of the kind of value he is speaking of) e di
-ricchezze se la terra, l’aria e l’acqua ne’ campi si trasmutino in grano, come se colla mano dell’uomo
-il glutine di un insetto si trasmuti in velluto ovvero alcuni pezzetti di metalio si organizzino a formare
-una ripetizione.” [“All the phenomena of the universe, whether produced by the hand of man or
-through the universal laws of physics, are not actual new creations, but merely a modification of
-matter. Joining together and separating are the only elements which the human mind always finds on
-analysing the concept of reproduction and it is just the same with the reproduction of value” (value in
-use, although Verri in this passage of his controversy with the Physiocrats is not himself quite certain
-of the kind of value he is speaking of) “and of wealth, when earth, air and water in the fields are
-transformed into corn, or when the hand of man transforms the secretions of an insect into silk, or
-some pieces of metal are arranged to make the mechanism of a watch.”] – Pietro Verri, “Meditazioni
-sulla Economia Politica” [first printed in 1773] in Custodi’s edition of the Italian Economists, Parte
-Moderna, t. XV., p. 22.
-14 Comp. Hegel, “Philosophie des Rechts.” Berlin, 1840. p. 250.
-15 The reader must note that we are not speaking here of the wages or value that the labourer gets for a
-given labour time, but of the value of the commodity in which that labour time is materialised. Wages
-is a category that, as yet, has no existence at the present stage of our investigation.
-16 In order to prove that labour alone is that all-sufficient and real measure, by which at all times the
-value of all commodities can be estimated and compared, Adam Smith says, “Equal quantities of
-labour must at all times and in all places have the same value for the labourer. In his normal state of
-health, strength, and activity, and with the average degree of skill that he may possess, he must always
-give up the same portion of his rest, his freedom, and his happiness.” (“Wealth of Nations,” b. I. ch.
-V.) On the one hand Adam Smith here (but not everywhere) confuses the determination of value by
-means of the quantity of labour expended in the production of commodities, with the determination of
-the values of commodities by means of the value of labour, and seeks in consequence to prove that
-equal quantities of labour have always the same value. On the other hand he has a presentiment, that
-labour, so far as it manifests itself in the value of commodities, counts only as expenditure of labour
-power, but he treats this expenditure as the mere sacrifice of rest, freedom, and happiness, not as at the
-same time the normal activity of living beings. But then, he has the modern wage-labourer in his eye.
-Much more aptly, the anonymous predecessor of Adam Smith, quoted above in note 9, this chapter,
-says “one man has employed himself a week in providing this necessary of life ... and he that gives
-him some other in exchange cannot make a better estimate of what is a proper equivalent, than by
-computing what cost him just as much labour and time; which in effect is no more than exchanging
-one man’s labour in one thing for a time certain, for another man’s labour in another thing for the
-same time.” (l.c., p. 39.) [The English language has the advantage of possessing different words for
-55 Chapter 1
-the two aspects of labour here considered. The labour which creates use value, and counts
-qualitatively, is Work, as distinguished from Labour, that which creates Value and counts
-quantitatively, is Labour as distinguished from Work ‒ Engels]
-17 The few economists, amongst whom is S. Bailey, who have occupied themselves with the analysis
-of the form of value, have been unable to arrive at any result, first, because they confuse the form of
-value with value itself; and second, because, under the coarse influence of the practical bourgeois,
-they exclusively give their attention to the quantitative aspect of the question. “The command of
-quantity ... constitutes value.” (“Money and its Vicissitudes.” London, 1837, p. 11. By S. Bailey.)
-18 The celebrated Franklin, one of the first economists, after Wm. Petty, who saw through the nature of
-value, says: “Trade in general being nothing else but the exchange of labour for labour, the value of all
-things is ... most justly measured by labour.” (“The works of B. Franklin, &c.,” edited by Sparks.
-Boston, 1836, Vol. II., p. 267.) Franklin is unconscious that by estimating the value of everything in
-labour, he makes abstraction from any difference in the sorts of labour exchanged, and thus reduces
-them all to equal human labour. But although ignorant of this, yet he says it. He speaks first of “the
-one labour,” then of “the other labour,” and finally of “labour,” without further qualification, as the
-substance of the value of everything.
-19 In a sort of way, it is with man as with commodities. Since he comes into the world neither with a
-looking glass in his hand, nor as a Fichtian philosopher, to whom “I am I” is sufficient, man first sees
-and recognises himself in other men. Peter only establishes his own identity as a man by first
-comparing himself with Paul as being of like kind. And thereby Paul, just as he stands in his Pauline
-personality, becomes to Peter the type of the genus homo.
-20 Value is here, as occasionally in the preceding pages, used in sense of value determined as to
-quantity, or of magnitude of value.
-21 This incongruity between the magnitude of value and its relative expression has, with customary
-ingenuity, been exploited by vulgar economists. For example – “Once admit that A falls, because B,
-with which it is exchanged, rises, while no less labour is bestowed in the meantime on A, and your
-general principle of value falls to the ground... If he [Ricardo] allowed that when A rises in value
-relatively to B, B falls in value relatively to A, he cut away the ground on which he rested his grand
-proposition, that the value of a commodity is ever determined by the labour embodied in it, for if a
-change in the cost of A alters not only its own value in relation to B, for which it is exchanged, but
-also the value of B relatively to that of A, though no change has taken place in the quantity of labour
-to produce B, then not only the doctrine falls to the ground which asserts that the quantity of labour
-bestowed on an article regulates its value, but also that which affirms the cost of an article to regulate
-its value’ (J. Broadhurst: “Political Economy,” London, 1842, pp. 11 and 14.) Mr. Broadhurst might
-just as well say: consider the fractions 10/20, 10/50, 10/100, &c., the number 10 remains unchanged,
-and yet its proportional magnitude, its magnitude relatively to the numbers 20, 50, 100 &c.,
-continually diminishes. Therefore the great principle that the magnitude of a whole number, such as
-10, is “regulated” by the number of times unity is contained in it, falls to the ground. [The author
-explains in section 4 of this chapter, pp. 80-81, note 2 (note 33 of this document), what he understands
-by “Vulgar Economy.” – Engels]
-22 Such expressions of relations in general, called by Hegel reflex categories, form a very curious
-class. For instance, one man is king only because other men stand in the relation of subjects to him.
-They, on the contrary, imagine that they are subjects because he is king.
-23 F. L. A. Ferrier, sous-inspecteur des douanes, “Du gouvernement considéré dans ses rapports avec
-le commerce,” Paris, 1805; and Charles Ganilh, “Des Systèmes d’Economie Politique, – 2nd ed.,
-Paris, 1821.
-56 Chapter 1
-24 In Homer, for instance, the value of an article is expressed in a series of different things. Iliad. VII.
-472-475.
-25 For this reason, we can speak of the coat value of the linen when its value is expressed in coats, or
-of its corn value when expressed in corn, and so on. Every such expression tells us, that what appears
-in the use values, coat, corn, &c., is the value of the linen. “The value of any commodity denoting its
-relation in exchange, we may speak of it as ... corn value, cloth value, according to the commodity
-with which it is compared; and hence there are a thousand different kinds of value, as many kinds of
-value as there are commodities in existence, and all are equally real and equally nominal.” (“A Critical
-Dissertation on the Nature, Measures and Causes of Value: chiefly in reference to the writings of Mr.
-Ricardo and his followers.” By the author of “Essays on the Formation, &c., of Opinions.” London,
-1825, p. 39.) S. Bailey, the author of this anonymous work, a work which in its day created much stir
-in England, fancied that, by thus pointing out the various relative expressions of one and the same
-value, he had proved the impossibility of any determination of the concept of value. However narrow
-his own views may have been, yet, that he laid his finger on some serious defects in the Ricardian
-Theory, is proved by the animosity with which he was attacked by Ricardo’s followers. See the
-Westminster Review for example.
-26 It is by no means self-evident that this character of direct and universal exchangeability is, so to
-speak, a polar one, and as intimately connected with its opposite pole, the absence of direct
-exchangeability, as the positive pole of the magnet is with its negative counterpart. It may therefore be
-imagined that all commodities can simultaneously have this character impressed upon them, just as it
-can be imagined that all Catholics can be popes together. It is, of course, highly desirable in the eyes
-of the petit bourgeois, for whom the production of commodities is the nec plus ultra of human
-freedom and individual independence, that the inconveniences resulting from this character of
-commodities not being directly exchangeable, should be removed. Proudhon’s socialism is a working
-out of this Philistine Utopia, a form of socialism which, as I have elsewhere shown, does not possess
-even the merit of originality. Long before his time, the task was attempted with much better success
-by Gray, Bray, and others. But, for all that, wisdom of this kind flourishes even now in certain circles
-under the name of “science.” Never has any school played more tricks with the word science, than that
-of Proudhon, for “wo Begriffe fehlen, Da stellt zur rechten Zeit ein Wort sich ein.” [“Where thoughts
-are absent, Words are brought in as convenient replacements,” Goethe’s, Faust, See Proudhon’s
-Philosophy of Poverty]
-26a In the German edition, there is the following footnote here: “One may recall that China and the
-tables began to dance when the rest of the world appeared to be standing still – pour encourager les
-autres [to encourage the others].” The defeat of the 1848-49 revolutions was followed by a period of
-dismal political reaction in Europe. At that time, spiritualism, especially table-turning, became the
-rage among the European aristocracy. In 1850-64, China was swept by an anti-feudal liberation
-movement in the form of a large-scale peasant war, the Taiping Revolt. – Note by editors of MECW.
-27 Among the ancient Germans the unit for measuring land was what could be harvested in a day, and
-was called Tagwerk, Tagwanne (jurnale, or terra jurnalis, or diornalis), Mannsmaad, &c. (See G. L.
-von Maurer, “Einleitung zur Geschichte der Mark, &c. Verfassung,” Munchen, 1854, p. 129 sq.)
-28 When, therefore, Galiani says: Value is a relation between persons – “La Ricchezza e una ragione
-tra due persone,” – he ought to have added: a relation between persons expressed as a relation between
-things. (Galiani: Della Moneta, p. 221, V. III. of Custodi’s collection of “Scrittori Classici Italiani di
-Economia Politica.” Parte Moderna, Milano 1803.)
-29 “What are we to think of a law that asserts itself only by periodical revolutions? It is just nothing
-but a law of Nature, founded on the want of knowledge of those whose action is the subject of it.”
-(Friedrich Engels: “Umrisse zu einer Kritik der Nationalökonomie,” in the “Deutsch-Französische
-Jahrbücher,” edited by Arnold Ruge and Karl Marx. Paris. 1844.)
-57 Chapter 1
-30 Even Ricardo has his stories à la Robinson. “He makes the primitive hunter and the primitive fisher
-straightway, as owners of commodities, exchange fish and game in the proportion in which labour
-time is incorporated in these exchange values. On this occasion he commits the anachronism of
-making these men apply to the calculation, so far as their implements have to be taken into account,
-the annuity tables in current use on the London Exchange in the year 1817. The parallelograms of Mr.
-Owen appear to be the only form of society, besides the bourgeois form, with which he was
-acquainted.” (Karl Marx: “Zur Kritik, &c..” pp. 38, 39)
-31 A ridiculous presumption has latterly got abroad that common property in its primitive form is
-specifically a Slavonian, or even exclusively Russian form. It is the primitive form that we can prove
-to have existed amongst Romans, Teutons, and Celts, and even to this day we find numerous
-examples, ruins though they be, in India. A more exhaustive study of Asiatic, and especially of Indian
-forms of common property, would show how from the different forms of primitive common property,
-different forms of its dissolution have been developed. Thus, for instance, the various original types of
-Roman and Teutonic private property are deducible from different forms of Indian common property.”
-(Karl Marx, “Zur Kritik, &c.,” p. 10.)
-32 The insufficiency of Ricardo’s analysis of the magnitude of value, and his analysis is by far the best,
-will appear from the 3rd and 4th books of this work. As regards value in general, it is the weak point
-of the classical school of Political Economy that it nowhere expressly and with full consciousness,
-distinguishes between labour, as it appears in the value of a product, and the same labour, as it appears
-in the use value of that product. Of course the distinction is practically made, since this school treats
-labour, at one time under its quantitative aspect, at another under its qualitative aspect. But it has not
-the least idea, that when the difference between various kinds of labour is treated as purely
-quantitative, their qualitative unity or equality, and therefore their reduction to abstract human labour,
-is implied. For instance, Ricardo declares that he agrees with Destutt de Tracy in this proposition: “As
-it is certain that our physical and moral faculties are alone our original riches, the employment of
-those faculties, labour of some kind, is our only original treasure, and it is always from this
-employment that all those things are created which we call riches... It is certain, too, that all those
-things only represent the labour which has created them, and if they have a value, or even two distinct
-values, they can only derive them from that (the value) of the labour from which they emanate.”
-(Ricardo, “The Principles of Pol. Econ.,” 3 Ed. Lond. 1821, p. 334.) We would here only point out,
-that Ricardo puts his own more profound interpretation upon the words of Destutt. What the latter
-really says is, that on the one hand all things which constitute wealth represent the labour that creates
-them, but that on the other hand, they acquire their “two different values” (use value and exchange
-value) from “the value of labour.” He thus falls into the commonplace error of the vulgar economists,
-who assume the value of one commodity (in this case labour) in order to determine the values of the
-rest. But Ricardo reads him as if he had said, that labour (not the value of labour) is embodied both in
-use value and exchange value. Nevertheless, Ricardo himself pays so little attention to the two-fold
-character of the labour which has a two-fold embodiment, that he devotes the whole of his chapter on
-“Value and Riches, Their Distinctive Properties,” to a laborious examination of the trivialities of a J.B.
-Say. And at the finish he is quite astonished to find that Destutt on the one hand agrees with him as to
-labour being the source of value, and on the other hand with J. B. Say as to the notion of value.
-33 It is one of the chief failings of classical economy that it has never succeeded, by means of its
-analysis of commodities, and, in particular, of their value, in discovering that form under which value
-becomes exchange value. Even Adam Smith and Ricardo, the best representatives of the school, treat
-the form of value as a thing of no importance, as having no connection with the inherent nature of
-commodities. The reason for this is not solely because their attention is entirely absorbed in the
-analysis of the magnitude of value. It lies deeper. The value form of the product of labour is not only
-the most abstract, but is also the most universal form, taken by the product in bourgeois production,
-58 Chapter 1
-and stamps that production as a particular species of social production, and thereby gives it its special
-historical character. If then we treat this mode of production as one eternally fixed by Nature for every
-state of society, we necessarily overlook that which is the differentia specifica of the value form, and
-consequently of the commodity form, and of its further developments, money form, capital form, &c.
-We consequently find that economists, who are thoroughly agreed as to labour time being the measure
-of the magnitude of value, have the most strange and contradictory ideas of money, the perfected form
-of the general equivalent. This is seen in a striking manner when they treat of banking, where the
-commonplace definitions of money will no longer hold water. This led to the rise of a restored
-mercantile system (Ganilh, &c.), which sees in value nothing but a social form, or rather the
-unsubstantial ghost of that form. Once for all I may here state, that by classical Political Economy, I
-understand that economy which, since the time of W. Petty, has investigated the real relations of
-production in bourgeois society in contradistinction to vulgar economy, which deals with appearances
-only, ruminates without ceasing on the materials long since provided by scientific economy, and there
-seeks plausible explanations of the most obtrusive phenomena, for bourgeois daily use, but for the
-rest, confines itself to systematising in a pedantic way, and proclaiming for everlasting truths, the trite
-ideas held by the self-complacent bourgeoisie with regard to their own world, to them the best of all
-possible worlds.
-34 “Les économistes ont une singulière manière de procéder. Il n’y a pour eux que deux sortes
-d’institutions, celles de l’art et celles de la nature. Les institutions de la féodalité sont des institutions
-artificielles celles de la bourgeoisie sont des institutions naturelles. Ils ressemblent en ceci aux
-théologiens, qui eux aussi établissent deux sortes de religions. Toute religion qui n’est pas la leur, est
-une invention des hommes tandis que leur propre religion est une émanation de Dieu ‒ Ainsi il y a eu
-de l’histoire, mais il n’y en a plus.” [“Economists have a singular method of procedure. There are only
-two kinds of institutions for them, artificial and natural. The institutions of feudalism are artificial
-institutions, those of the bourgeoisie are natural institutions. In this they resemble the theologians, who
-likewise establish two kinds of religion. Every religion which is not theirs is an invention of men,
-while their own is an emanation from God. ... Thus there has been history, but there is no longer any”]
-(Karl Marx. Misère de la Philosophie. Réponse a la Philosophie de la Misère par M. Proudhon, 1847,
-p. 113.) Truly comical is M. Bastiat, who imagines that the ancient Greeks and Romans lived by
-plunder alone. But when people plunder for centuries, there must always be something at hand for
-them to seize; the objects of plunder must be continually reproduced. It would thus appear that even
-Greeks and Romans had some process of production, consequently, an economy, which just as much
-constituted the material basis of their world, as bourgeois economy constitutes that of our modern
-world. Or perhaps Bastiat means, that a mode of production based on slavery is based on a system of
-plunder. In that case he treads on dangerous ground. If a giant thinker like Aristotle erred in his
-appreciation of slave labour, why should a dwarf economist like Bastiat be right in his appreciation of
-wage labour? I seize this opportunity of shortly answering an objection taken by a German paper in
-America, to my work, “Zur Kritik der Pol. Oekonomie, 1859.” In the estimation of that paper, my
-view that each special mode of production and the social relations corresponding to it, in short, that
-the economic structure of society, is the real basis on which the juridical and political superstructure is
-raised and to which definite social forms of thought correspond; that the mode of production
-determines the character of the social, political, and intellectual life generally, all this is very true for
-our own times, in which material interests preponderate, but not for the middle ages, in which
-Catholicism, nor for Athens and Rome, where politics, reigned supreme. In the first place it strikes
-one as an odd thing for any one to suppose that these well-worn phrases about the middle ages and the
-ancient world are unknown to anyone else. This much, however, is clear, that the middle ages could
-not live on Catholicism, nor the ancient world on politics. On the contrary, it is the mode in which
-they gained a livelihood that explains why here politics, and there Catholicism, played the chief part.
-For the rest, it requires but a slight acquaintance with the history of the Roman republic, for example,
-59 Chapter 1
-to be aware that its secret history is the history of its landed property. On the other hand, Don Quixote
-long ago paid the penalty for wrongly imagining that knight errantry was compatible with all
-economic forms of society.
-35 “Observations on certain verbal disputes in Pol. Econ., particularly relating to value and to demand
-and supply” Lond., 1821, p. 16.
-36 S. Bailey, l.c., p. 165.
-37 The author of “Observations” and S. Bailey accuse Ricardo of converting exchange value from
-something relative into something absolute. The opposite is the fact. He has explained the apparent
-relation between objects, such as diamonds and pearls, in which relation they appear as exchange
-values, and disclosed the true relation hidden behind the appearances, namely, their relation to each
-other as mere expressions of human labour. If the followers of Ricardo answer Bailey somewhat
-rudely, and by no means convincingly, the reason is to be sought in this, that they were unable to find
-in Ricardo’s own works any key to the hidden relations existing between value and its form, exchange
-value.
-Chapter 2: Exchange
-It is plain that commodities cannot go to market and make exchanges of their own account. We
-must, therefore, have recourse to their guardians, who are also their owners. Commodities are
-things, and therefore without power of resistance against man. If they are wanting in docility he
-can use force; in other words, he can take possession of them.1 In order that these objects may
-enter into relation with each other as commodities, their guardians must place themselves in
-relation to one another, as persons whose will resides in those objects, and must behave in such a
-way that each does not appropriate the commodity of the other, and part with his own, except by
-means of an act done by mutual consent. They must therefore, mutually recognise in each other
-the rights of private proprietors. This juridical relation, which thus expresses itself in a contract,
-whether such contract be part of a developed legal system or not, is a relation between two wills,
-and is but the reflex of the real economic relation between the two. It is this economic relation
-that determines the subject-matter comprised in each such juridical act.2
-The persons exist for one another merely as representatives of, and, therefore. as owners of,
-commodities. In the course of our investigation we shall find, in general, that the characters who
-appear on the economic stage are but the personifications of the economic relations that exist
-between them.
-What chiefly distinguishes a commodity from its owner is the fact, that it looks upon every other
-commodity as but the form of appearance of its own value. A born leveller and a cynic, it is
-always ready to exchange not only soul, but body, with any and every other commodity, be the
-same more repulsive than Maritornes herself. The owner makes up for this lack in the commodity
-of a sense of the concrete, by his own five and more senses. His commodity possesses for himself
-no immediate use-value. Otherwise, he would not bring it to the market. It has use-value for
-others; but for himself its only direct use-value is that of being a depository of exchange-value,
-and, consequently, a means of exchange. 3 Therefore, he makes up his mind to part with it for
-commodities whose value in use is of service to him. All commodities are non-use-values for
-their owners, and use-values for their non-owners. Consequently, they must all change hands. But
-this change of hands is what constitutes their exchange, and the latter puts them in relation with
-each other as values, and realises them as values. Hence commodities must be realised as values
-before they can be realised as use-values.
-On the other hand, they must show that they are use-values before they can be realised as values.
-For the labour spent upon them counts effectively, only in so far as it is spent in a form that is
-useful for others. Whether that labour is useful for others, and its product consequently capable of
-satisfying the wants of others, can be proved only by the act of exchange.
-Every owner of a commodity wishes to part with it in exchange only for those commodities
-whose use-value satisfies some want of his. Looked at in this way, exchange is for him simply a
-private transaction. On the other hand, he desires to realise the value of his commodity, to convert
-it into any other suitable commodity of equal value, irrespective of whether his own commodity
-has or has not any use-value for the owner of the other. From this point of view, exchange is for
-him a social transaction of a general character. But one and the same set of transactions cannot be
-simultaneously for all owners of commodities both exclusively private and exclusively social and
-general.
-Let us look at the matter a little closer. To the owner of a commodity, every other commodity is,
-in regard to his own, a particular equivalent, and consequently his own commodity is the
-61 Chapter 2
-universal equivalent for all the others. But since this applies to every owner, there is, in fact, no
-commodity acting as universal equivalent, and the relative value of commodities possesses no
-general form under which they can be equated as values and have the magnitude of their values
-compared. So far, therefore, they do not confront each other as commodities, but only as products
-or use-values. In their difficulties our commodity owners think like Faust: “Im Anfang war die
-Tat.” [“In the beginning was the deed.” – Goethe, Faust.] They therefore acted and transacted
-before they thought. Instinctively they conform to the laws imposed by the nature of
-commodities. They cannot bring their commodities into relation as values, and therefore as
-commodities, except by comparing them with some one other commodity as the universal
-equivalent. That we saw from the analysis of a commodity. But a particular commodity cannot
-become the universal equivalent except by a social act. The social action therefore of all other
-commodities, sets apart the particular commodity in which they all represent their values.
-Thereby the bodily form of this commodity becomes the form of the socially recognised universal
-equivalent. To be the universal equivalent, becomes, by this social process, the specific function
-of the commodity thus excluded by the rest. Thus it becomes – money. “Illi unum consilium
-habent et virtutem et potestatem suam bestiae tradunt. Et ne quis possit emere aut vendere, nisi
-qui habet characterem aut nomen bestiae aut numerum nominis ejus.” [“These have one mind,
-and shall give their power and strength unto the beast.” Revelations, 17:13; “And that no man
-might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his
-name.” Revelations, 13:17.] (Apocalypse.)
-Money is a crystal formed of necessity in the course of the exchanges, whereby different products
-of labour are practically equated to one another and thus by practice converted into commodities.
-The historical progress and extension of exchanges develops the contrast, latent in commodities,
-between use-value and value. The necessity for giving an external expression to this contrast for
-the purposes of commercial intercourse, urges on the establishment of an independent form of
-value, and finds no rest until it is once for all satisfied by the differentiation of commodities into
-commodities and money. At the same rate, then, as the conversion of products into commodities
-is being accomplished, so also is the conversion of one special commodity into money.4
-The direct barter of products attains the elementary form of the relative expression of value in one
-respect, but not in another. That form is x Commodity A = y Commodity B. The form of direct
-barter is x use-value A = y use-value B.5 The articles A and B in this case are not as yet
-commodities, but become so only by the act of barter. The first step made by an object of utility
-towards acquiring exchange-value is when it forms a non-use-value for its owner, and that
-happens when it forms a superfluous portion of some article required for his immediate wants.
-Objects in themselves are external to man, and consequently alienable by him. In order that this
-alienation may be reciprocal, it is only necessary for men, by a tacit understanding, to treat each
-other as private owners of those alienable objects, and by implication as independent individuals.
-But such a state of reciprocal independence has no existence in a primitive society based on
-property in common, whether such a society takes the form of a patriarchal family, an ancient
-Indian community, or a Peruvian Inca State. The exchange of commodities, therefore, first begins
-on the boundaries of such communities, at their points of contact with other similar communities,
-or with members of the latter. So soon, however, as products once become commodities in the
-external relations of a community, they also, by reaction, become so in its internal intercourse.
-The proportions in which they are exchangeable are at first quite a matter of chance. What makes
-them exchangeable is the mutual desire of their owners to alienate them. Meantime the need for
-foreign objects of utility gradually establishes itself. The constant repetition of exchange makes it
-a normal social act. In the course of time, therefore, some portion at least of the products of
-62 Chapter 2
-labour must be produced with a special view to exchange. From that moment the distinction
-becomes firmly established between the utility of an object for the purposes of consumption, and
-its utility for the purposes of exchange. Its use-value becomes distinguished from its exchange-
-value. On the other hand, the quantitative proportion in which the articles are exchangeable,
-becomes dependent on their production itself. Custom stamps them as values with definite
-magnitudes.
-In the direct barter of products, each commodity is directly a means of exchange to its owner, and
-to all other persons an equivalent, but that only in so far as it has use-value for them. At this
-stage, therefore, the articles exchanged do not acquire a value-form independent of their own use-
-value, or of the individual needs of the exchangers. The necessity for a value-form grows with the
-increasing number and variety of the commodities exchanged. The problem and the means of
-solution arise simultaneously. Commodity-owners never equate their own commodities to those
-of others, and exchange them on a large scale, without different kinds of commodities belonging
-to different owners being exchangeable for, and equated as values to, one and the same special
-article. Such last-mentioned article, by becoming the equivalent of various other commodities,
-acquires at once, though within narrow limits, the character of a general social equivalent. This
-character comes and goes with the momentary social acts that called it into life. In turns and
-transiently it attaches itself first to this and then to that commodity. But with the development of
-exchange it fixes itself firmly and exclusively to particular sorts of commodities, and becomes
-crystallised by assuming the money-form. The particular kind of commodity to which it sticks is
-at first a matter of accident. Nevertheless there are two circumstances whose influence is decisive.
-The money-form attaches itself either to the most important articles of exchange from outside,
-and these in fact are primitive and natural forms in which the exchange-value of home products
-finds expression; or else it attaches itself to the object of utility that forms, like cattle, the chief
-portion of indigenous alienable wealth. Nomad races are the first to develop the money-form,
-because all their worldly goods consist of moveable objects and are therefore directly alienable;
-and because their mode of life, by continually bringing them into contact with foreign
-communities, solicits the exchange of products. Man has often made man himself, under the form
-of slaves, serve as the primitive material of money, but has never used land for that purpose. Such
-an idea could only spring up in a bourgeois society already well developed. It dates from the last
-third of the 17th century, and the first attempt to put it in practice on a national scale was made a
-century afterwards, during the French bourgeois revolution.
-In proportion as exchange bursts its local bonds, and the value of commodities more and more
-expands into an embodiment of human labour in the abstract, in the same proportion the character
-of money attaches itself to commodities that are by Nature fitted to perform the social function of
-a universal equivalent. Those commodities are the precious metals.
-The truth of the proposition that, “although gold and silver are not by Nature money, money is by
-Nature gold and silver,”6 is shown by the fitness of the physical properties of these metals for the
-functions of money.7 Up to this point, however, we are acquainted only with one function of
-money, namely, to serve as the form of manifestation of the value of commodities, or as the
-material in which the magnitudes of their values are socially expressed. An adequate form of
-manifestation of value, a fit embodiment of abstract, undifferentiated, and therefore equal human
-labour, that material alone can be whose every sample exhibits the same uniform qualities. On the
-other hand, since the difference between the magnitudes of value is purely quantitative, the
-money commodity must be susceptible of merely quantitative differences, must therefore be
-divisible at will, and equally capable of being reunited. Gold and silver possess these properties
-by Nature.
-63 Chapter 2
-The use-value of the money-commodity becomes two-fold. In addition to its special use-value as
-a commodity (gold, for instance, serving to stop teeth, to form the raw material of articles of
-luxury, &c.), it acquires a formal use-value, originating in its specific social function.
-Since all commodities are merely particular equivalents of money, the latter being their universal
-equivalent, they, with regard to the latter as the universal commodity, play the parts of particular
-commodities. 8
-We have seen that the money-form is but the reflex, thrown upon one single commodity, of the
-value relations between all the rest. That money is a commodity9 is therefore a new discovery
-only for those who, when they analyse it, start from its fully developed shape. The act of
-exchange gives to the commodity converted into money, not its value, but its specific value-form.
-By confounding these two distinct things some writers have been led to hold that the value of
-gold and silver is imaginary.10 The fact that money can, in certain functions, be replaced by mere
-symbols of itself, gave rise to that other mistaken notion, that it is itself a mere symbol.
-Nevertheless under this error lurked a presentiment that the money-form of an object is not an
-inseparable part of that object, but is simply the form under which certain social relations
-manifest themselves. In this sense every commodity is a symbol, since, in so far as it is value, it is
-only the material envelope of the human labour spent upon it.11 But if it be declared that the
-social characters assumed by objects, or the material forms assumed by the social qualities of
-labour under the régime of a definite mode of production, are mere symbols, it is in the same
-breath also declared that these characteristics are arbitrary fictions sanctioned by the so-called
-universal consent of mankind. This suited the mode of explanation in favour during the 18th
-century. Unable to account for the origin of the puzzling forms assumed by social relations
-between man and man, people sought to denude them of their strange appearance by ascribing to
-them a conventional origin.
-It has already been remarked above that the equivalent form of a commodity does not imply the
-determination of the magnitude of its value. Therefore, although we may be aware that gold is
-money, and consequently directly exchangeable for all other commodities, yet that fact by no
-means tells how much 10 lbs., for instance, of gold is worth. Money, like every other commodity,
-cannot express the magnitude of its value except relatively in other commodities. This value is
-determined by the labour-time required for its production, and is expressed by the quantity of any
-other commodity that costs the same amount of labour-time.12 Such quantitative determination of
-its relative value takes place at the source of its production by means of barter. When it steps into
-circulation as money, its value is already given. In the last decades of the 17th century it had
-already been shown that money is a commodity, but this step marks only the infancy of the
-analysis. The difficulty lies, not in comprehending that money is a commodity, but in discovering
-how, why, and by what means a commodity becomes money.13
-We have already seen, from the most elementary expression of value, x commodity A = y
-commodity B, that the object in which the magnitude of the value of another object is
-represented, appears to have the equivalent form independently of this relation, as a social
-property given to it by Nature. We followed up this false appearance to its final establishment,
-which is complete so soon as the universal equivalent form becomes identified with the bodily
-form of a particular commodity, and thus crystallised into the money-form. What appears to
-happen is, not that gold becomes money, in consequence of all other commodities expressing
-their values in it, but, on the contrary, that all other commodities universally express their values
-in gold, because it is money. The intermediate steps of the process vanish in the result and leave
-no trace behind. Commodities find their own value already completely represented, without any
-initiative on their part, in another commodity existing in company with them. These objects, gold
-64 Chapter 2
-and silver, just as they come out of the bowels of the earth, are forthwith the direct incarnation of
-all human labour. Hence the magic of money. In the form of society now under consideration, the
-behaviour of men in the social process of production is purely atomic. Hence their relations to
-each other in production assume a material character independent of their control and conscious
-individual action. These facts manifest themselves at first by products as a general rule taking the
-form of commodities. We have seen how the progressive development of a society of
-commodity-producers stamps one privileged commodity with the character of money. Hence the
-riddle presented by money is but the riddle presented by commodities; only it now strikes us in its
-most glaring form.
-1 In the 12th century, so renowned for its piety, they included amongst commodities some very
-delicate things. Thus a French poet of the period enumerates amongst the goods to be found in the
-market of Landit, not only clothing, shoes, leather, agricultural implements, &c., but also “femmes
-folles de leur corps.”
-2 Proudhon begins by taking his ideal of Justice, of “justice éternelle,” from the juridical relations that
-correspond to the production of commodities: thereby, it may be noted, he proves, to the consolation
-of all good citizens, that the production of commodities is a form of production as everlasting as
-justice. Then he turns round and seeks to reform the actual production of commodities, and the actual
-legal system corresponding thereto, in accordance with this ideal. What opinion should we have of a
-chemist, who, instead of studying the actual laws of the molecular changes in the composition and
-decomposition of matter, and on that foundation solving definite problems, claimed to regulate the
-composition and decomposition of matter by means of the “eternal ideas,” of “naturalité” and
-“affinité”? Do we really know any more about “usury,” when we say it contradicts “justice éternelle,”
-“équité éternelle,” “mutualité éternelle,” and other “vérités éternelles” than the fathers of the church
-did when they said it was incompatible with “grâce éternelle,” “foi éternelle,” and “la volonté éternelle
-de Dieu”?
-3 For two-fold is the use of every object.... The one is peculiar to the object as such, the other is not, as
-a sandal which may be worn, and is also exchangeable. Both are uses of the sandal, for even he who
-exchanges the sandal for the money or food he is in want of, makes use of the sandal as a sandal. But
-not in its natural way. For it has not been made for the sake of being exchanged.” (Aristoteles, “De
-Rep.” l. i. c. 9.)
-4 From this we may form an estimate of the shrewdness of the petit-bourgeois socialism, which, while
-perpetuating the production of commodities, aims at abolishing the “antagonism” between money and
-commodities, and consequently, since money exists only by virtue of this antagonism, at abolishing
-money itself. We might just as well try to retain Catholicism without the Pope. For more on this point
-see my work, “Zur Kritik der Pol. Oekon.,” p. 61, sq.
-5 So long as, instead of two distinct use-values being exchanged, a chaotic mass of articles are offered
-as the equivalent of a single article, which is often the case with savages, even the direct barter of
-products is in its first infancy.
-6 Karl Marx, l.c., p. 135. “I metalli ... naturalmente moneta.” [“The metals ... are by their nature
-money.”] (Galiani, “Della moneta” in Custodi’s Collection: Parte Moderna t. iii.)
-7 For further details on this subject see in my work cited above, the chapter on “The precious metals.”
-8 “Il danaro è la merce universale"(Verri, l.c., p. 16).
-9 “Silver and gold themselves (which we may call by the general name of bullion) are ... commodities
-... rising and falling in ... value ... Bullion, then, may be reckoned to be of higher value where the
-smaller weight will purchase the greater quantity of the product or manufacture of the countrey,” &c.
-(“A Discourse of the General Notions of Money, Trade, and Exchanges, as They Stand in Relation
-each to other.” By a Merchant. Lond., 1695, p. 7.) “Silver and gold, coined or uncoined, though they
-65 Chapter 2
-are used for a measure of all other things, are no less a commodity than wine, oil, tobacco, cloth, or
-stuffs.” (“A Discourse concerning Trade, and that in particular of the East Indies,” &c. London, 1689,
-p. 2.) “The stock and riches of the kingdom cannot properly be confined to money, nor ought gold and
-silver to be excluded from being merchandise.” ("The East-India Trade a Most Profitable Trade.”
-London, 1677, p. 4.)
-10 L’oro e l’argento hanno valore come metalli anteriore all’esser moneta.” [“Gold and silver have
-value as metals before they are money”] (Galiani, l.c.) Locke says, “The universal consent of mankind
-gave to silver, on account of its qualities which made it suitable for money, an imaginary value.” Law,
-on the other hand. “How could different nations give an imaginary value to any single thing... or how
-could this imaginary value have maintained itself?” But the following shows how little he himself
-understood about the matter: “Silver was exchanged in proportion to the value in use it possessed,
-consequently in proportion to its real value. By its adoption as money it received an additional value
-(une valeur additionnelle).” (Jean Law: “Considérations sur le numéraire et le commerce” in E.
-Daire’s Edit. of “Economistes Financiers du XVIII siècle,” p. 470.)
-11 “L’Argent en (des denrées) est le signe.” [“Money is their (the commodities’) symbol”] (V. de
-Forbonnais: “Eléments du Commerce, Nouv. Edit. Leyde, 1766,” t. II., p. 143.) “Comme signe il est
-attiré par les denrées.” [“As a symbol it is attracted by the commodities”] (l.c., p. 155.) “L’argent est
-un signe d’une chose et la représente.” [“Money is a symbol of a thing and represents it.”]
-(Montesquieu: “Esprit des Lois,” (Oeuvres, Lond. 1767, t. II, p. 2.) “L’argent n’est pas simple signe,
-car il est lui-même richesse, il ne représente pas les valeurs, il les équivaut.” [“Money is not a mere
-symbol, for it is itself wealth; it does not represent the values, it is their equivalents”] (Le Trosne, l.c.,
-p. 910.) “The notion of value contemplates the valuable article as a mere symbol ‒ the article counts
-not for what it is, but for what it is worth.” (Hegel, l.c., p. 100.) Lawyers started long before
-economists the idea that money is a mere symbol, and that the value of the precious metals is purely
-imaginary. This they did in the sycophantic service of the crowned heads, supporting the right of the
-latter to debase the coinage, during the whole of the middle ages, by the traditions of the Roman
-Empire and the conceptions of money to be found in the Pandects. “Qu’aucun puisse ni doive faire
-doute,” [“Let no one call into question,”] says an apt scholar of theirs, Philip of Valois, in a decree of
-1346, “que à nous et à notre majesté royale n’appartiennent seulement ... le mestier, le fait, l’état, la
-provision et toute l’ordonnance des monnaies, de donner tel cours, et pour tel prix comme il nous plait
-et bon nous semble.” [“that the trade, the composition, the supply and the power of issuing ordinances
-on the currency ... belongs exclusively to us and to our royal majesty, to fix such a rate and at such
-price as it shall please us and seem good to us”] It was a maxim of the Roman Law that the value of
-money was fixed by decree of the emperor. It was expressly forbidden to treat money as a commodity.
-“Pecunias vero nulli emere fas erit, nam in usu publico constitutas oportet non esse mercem.”
-[“However, it shall not be lawful to anyone to buy money, for, as it was created for public use, it is not
-permissible for it to be a commodity”] Some good work on this question has been done by G. F.
-Pagnini: “Saggio sopra il giusto pregio delle cose, 1751"; Custodi “Parte Moderna,” t. II. In the second
-part of his work Pagnini directs his polemics especially against the lawyers.
-12 “If a man can bring to London an ounce of Silver out of the Earth in Peru, in the same time that he
-can produce a bushel of Corn, then the one is the natural price of the other; now, if by reason of new
-or more easier mines a man can procure two ounces of silver as easily as he formerly did one, the corn
-will be as cheap at ten shillings the bushel as it was before at five shillings, caeteris paribus.” William
-Petty. “A Treatise of Taxes and Contributions.” Lond., 1667, p. 32.
-13 The learned Professor Roscher, after first informing us that “the false definitions of money may be
-divided into two main groups: those which make it more, and those which make it less, than a
-commodity,” gives us a long and very mixed catalogue of works on the nature of money, from which
-it appears that he has not the remotest idea of the real history of the theory; and then he moralises thus:
-66 Chapter 2
-“For the rest, it is not to be denied that most of the later economists do not bear sufficiently in mind
-the peculiarities that distinguish money from other commodities” (it is then, after all, either more or
-less than a commodity!)... “So far, the semi-mercantilist reaction of Ganilh is not altogether without
-foundation.” (Wilhelm Roscher: “Die Grundlagen der Nationaloekonomie,” 3rd Edn. 1858, pp. 207-
-210.) More! less! not sufficiently! so far! not altogether! What clearness and precision of ideas and
-language! And such eclectic professorial twaddle is modestly baptised by Mr. Roscher, “the
-anatomico-physiological method” of Political Economy! One discovery however, he must have credit
-for, namely, that money is “a pleasant commodity.”
-Chapter 3: Money, Or the Circulation of
-Commodities
-Section 1: The Measure of Values
-Throughout this work, I assume, for the sake of simplicity, gold as the money-commodity.
-The first chief function of money is to supply commodities with the material for the expression of
-their values, or to represent their values as magnitudes of the same denomination, qualitatively
-equal, and quantitatively comparable. It thus serves as a universal measure of value. And only by
-virtue of this function does gold, the equivalent commodity par excellence, become money.
-It is not money that renders commodities commensurable. Just the contrary. It is because all
-commodities, as values, are realised human labour, and therefore commensurable, that their
-values can be measured by one and the same special commodity, and the latter be converted into
-the common measure of their values, i.e., into money. Money as a measure of value, is the
-phenomenal form that must of necessity be assumed by that measure of value which is immanent
-in commodities, labour-time.1
-The expression of the value of a commodity in gold – x commodity A = y money-commodity – is
-its money-form or price. A single equation, such as 1 ton of iron = 2 ounces of gold, now suffices
-to express the value of the iron in a socially valid manner. There is no longer any need for this
-equation to figure as a link in the chain of equations that express the values of all other
-commodities, because the equivalent commodity, gold, now has the character of money. The
-general form of relative value has resumed its original shape of simple or isolated relative value.
-On the other hand, the expanded expression of relative value, the endless series of equations, has
-now become the form peculiar to the relative value of the money-commodity. The series itself,
-too, is now given, and has social recognition in the prices of actual commodities. We have only to
-read the quotations of a price-list backwards, to find the magnitude of the value of money
-expressed in all sorts of commodities. But money itself has no price. In order to put it on an equal
-footing with all other commodities in this respect, we should be obliged to equate it to itself as its
-own equivalent.
-The price or money-form of commodities is, like their form of value generally, a form quite
-distinct from their palpable bodily form; it is, therefore, a purely ideal or mental form. Although
-invisible, the value of iron, linen and corn has actual existence in these very articles: it is ideally
-made perceptible by their equality with gold, a relation that, so to say, exists only in their own
-heads. Their owner must, therefore, lend them his tongue, or hang a ticket on them, before their
-prices can be communicated to the outside world.2 Since the expression of the value of
-commodities in gold is a merely ideal act, we may use for this purpose imaginary or ideal money.
-Every trader knows, that he is far from having turned his goods into money, when he has
-expressed their value in a price or in imaginary money, and that it does not require the least bit of
-real gold, to estimate in that metal millions of pounds’ worth of goods. When, therefore, money
-serves as a measure of value, it is employed only as imaginary or ideal money. This circumstance
-has given rise to the wildest theories.3 But, although the money that performs the functions of a
-measure of value is only ideal money, price depends entirely upon the actual substance that is
-money. The value, or in other words, the quantity of human labour contained in a ton of iron, is
-expressed in imagination by such a quantity of the money-commodity as contains the same
-amount of labour as the iron. According, therefore, as the measure of value is gold, silver, or
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-copper, the value of the ton of iron will be expressed by very different prices, or will be
-represented by very different quantities of those metals respectively.
-If, therefore, two different commodities, such as gold and silver, are simultaneously measures of
-value, all commodities have two prices – one a gold-price, the other a silver-price. These exist
-quietly side by side, so long as the ratio of the value of silver to that of gold remains unchanged,
-say, at 15:1. Every change in their ratio disturbs the ratio which exists between the gold-prices
-and the silver-prices of commodities, and thus proves, by facts, that a double standard of value is
-inconsistent with the functions of a standard. 4
-Commodities with definite prices present themselves under the form: a commodity A = x gold; b
-commodity B = z gold; c commodity C = y gold, &c., where a, b, c, represent definite quantities
-of the commodities A, B, C and x, z, y, definite quantities of gold. The values of these
-commodities are, therefore, changed in imagination into so many different quantities of gold.
-Hence, in spite of the confusing variety of the commodities themselves, their values become
-magnitudes of the same denomination, gold-magnitudes. They are now capable of being
-compared with each other and measured, and the want becomes technically felt of comparing
-them with some fixed quantity of gold as a unit measure. This unit, by subsequent division into
-aliquot parts, becomes itself the standard or scale. Before they become money, gold, silver, and
-copper already possess such standard measures in their standards of weight, so that, for example,
-a pound weight, while serving as the unit, is, on the one hand, divisible into ounces, and, on the
-other, may be combined to make up hundredweights.5 It is owing to this that, in all metallic
-currencies, the names given to the standards of money or of price were originally taken from the
-pre-existing names of the standards of weight.
-As measure of Value, and as standard of price, money has two entirely distinct functions to
-perform. It is the measure of value inasmuch as it is the socially recognised incarnation of human
-labour; it is the standard of price inasmuch as it is a fixed weight of metal. As the measure of
-value it serves to convert the values of all the manifold commodities into prices, into imaginary
-quantities of gold; as the standard of price it measures those quantities of gold. The measure of
-values measures commodities considered as values; the standard of price measures, on the
-contrary, quantities of gold by a unit quantity of gold, not the value of one quantity of gold by the
-weight of another. In order to make gold a standard of price, a certain weight must be fixed upon
-as the unit. In this case, as in all cases of measuring quantities of the same denomination, the
-establishment of an unvarying unit of measure is all-important. Hence, the less the unit is subject
-to variation, so much the better does the standard of price fulfil its office. But only in so far as it
-is itself a product of labour, and, therefore, potentially variable in value, can gold serve as a
-measure of value. 6
-It is, in the first place, quite clear that a change in the value of gold does not, in any way, affect its
-function as a standard of price. No matter how this value varies, the proportions between the
-values of different quantities of the metal remain constant. However great the fall in its value, 12
-ounces of gold still have 12 times the value of 1 ounce; and in prices, the only thing considered is
-the relation between different quantities of gold. Since, on the other hand, no rise or fall in the
-value of an ounce of gold can alter its weight, no alteration can take place in the weight of its
-aliquot parts. Thus gold always renders the same service as an invariable standard of price,
-however much its value may vary.
-In the second place, a change in the value of gold does not interfere with its functions as a
-measure of value. The change affects all commodities simultaneously, and, therefore, caeteris
-paribus, leaves their relative values inter se, unaltered, although those values are now expressed
-in higher or lower gold-prices.
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-Just as when we estimate the value of any commodity by a definite quantity of the use-value of
-some other commodity, so in estimating the value of the former in gold, we assume nothing more
-than that the production of a given quantity of gold costs, at the given period, a given amount of
-labour. As regards the fluctuations of prices generally, they are subject to the laws of elementary
-relative value investigated in a former chapter.
-A general rise in the prices of commodities can result only, either from a rise in their values – the
-value of money remaining constant – or from a fall in the value of money, the values of
-commodities remaining constant. On the other hand, a general fall in prices can result only, either
-from a fall in the values of commodities – the value of money remaining constant – or from a rise
-in the value of money, the values of commodities remaining constant. It therefore by no means
-follows, that a rise in the value of money necessarily implies a proportional fall in the prices of
-commodities; or that a fall in the value of money implies a proportional rise in prices. Such
-change of price holds good only in the case of commodities whose value remains constant. With
-those, for example, whose value rises, simultaneously with, and proportionally to, that of money,
-there is no alteration in price. And if their value rise either slower or faster than that of money, the
-fall or rise in their prices will be determined by the difference between the change in their value
-and that of money; and so on.
-Let us now go back to the consideration of the price-form.
-By degrees there arises a discrepancy between the current money-names of the various weights of
-the precious metal figuring as money, and the actual weights which those names originally
-represented. This discrepancy is the result of historical causes, among which the chief are: – (1)
-The importation of foreign money into an imperfectly developed community. This happened in
-Rome in its early days, where gold and silver coins circulated at first as foreign commodities. The
-names of these foreign coins never coincide with those of the indigenous weights. (2) As wealth
-increases, the less precious metal is thrust out by the more precious from its place as a measure of
-value, copper by silver, silver by gold, however much this order of sequence may be in
-contradiction with poetical chronology. 7The word pound, for instance, was the money-name
-given to an actual pound weight of silver. When gold replaced silver as a measure of value, the
-same name was applied according to the ratio between the values of silver and gold, to perhaps 1-
-15th of a pound of gold. The word pound, as a money-name, thus becomes differentiated from the
-same word as a weight-name.8 (3) The debasing of money carried on for centuries by kings and
-princes to such an extent that, of the original weights of the coins, nothing in fact remained but
-the names.9
-These historical causes convert the separation of the money-name from the weight-name into an
-established habit with the community. Since the standard of money is on the one hand purely
-conventional, and must on the other hand find general acceptance, it is in the end regulated by
-law. A given weight of one of the precious metals, an ounce of gold, for instance, becomes
-officially divided into aliquot parts, with legally bestowed names, such as pound, dollar, &c.
-These aliquot parts, which thenceforth serve as units of money, are then subdivided into other
-aliquot parts with legal names, such as shilling, penny, &c.10 But, both before and after these
-divisions are made, a definite weight of metal is the standard of metallic money. The sole
-alteration consists in the subdivision and denomination.
-The prices, or quantities of gold, into which the values of commodities are ideally changed, are
-therefore now expressed in the names of coins, or in the legally valid names of the subdivisions of
-the gold standard. Hence, instead of saying: A quarter of wheat is worth an ounce of gold; we say,
-it is worth £3 17s. 10 1/2d. In this way commodities express by their prices how much they are
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-worth, and money serves as money of account whenever it is a question of fixing the value of an
-article in its money-form. 11
-The name of a thing is something distinct from the qualities of that thing. I know nothing of a
-man, by knowing that his name is Jacob. In the same way with regard to money, every trace of a
-value-relation disappears in the names pound, dollar, franc, ducat, &c. The confusion caused by
-attributing a hidden meaning to these cabalistic signs is all the greater, because these money-
-names express both the values of commodities, and, at the same time, aliquot parts of the weight
-of the metal that is the standard of money.12 On the other hand, it is absolutely necessary that
-value, in order that it may be distinguished from the varied bodily forms of commodities, should
-assume this material and unmeaning, but, at the same time, purely social form. 13
-Price is the money-name of the labour realised in a commodity. Hence the expression of the
-equivalence of a commodity with the sum of money constituting its price, is a tautology14, just as
-in general the expression of the relative value of a commodity is a statement of the equivalence of
-two commodities. But although price, being the exponent of the magnitude of a commodity’s
-value, is the exponent of its exchange-ratio with money, it does not follow that the exponent of
-this exchange-ratio is necessarily the exponent of the magnitude of the commodity’s value.
-Suppose two equal quantities of socially necessary labour to be respectively represented by 1
-quarter of wheat and £2 (nearly 1/2 oz. of gold), £2 is the expression in money of the magnitude
-of the value of the quarter of wheat, or is its price. If now circumstances allow of this price being
-raised to £3, or compel it to be reduced to £1, then although £1 and £3 may be too small or too
-great properly to express the magnitude of the wheat’s value; nevertheless they are its prices, for
-they are, in the first place, the form under which its value appears, i.e., money; and in the second
-place, the exponents of its exchange-ratio with money. If the conditions of production, in other
-words, if the productive power of labour remain constant, the same amount of social labour-time
-must, both before and after the change in price, be expended in the reproduction of a quarter of
-wheat. This circumstance depends, neither on the will of the wheat producer, nor on that of the
-owners of other commodities.
-Magnitude of value expresses a relation of social production, it expresses the connexion that
-necessarily exists between a certain article and the portion of the total labour-time of society
-required to produce it. As soon as magnitude of value is converted into price, the above necessary
-relation takes the shape of a more or less accidental exchange-ratio between a single commodity
-and another, the money-commodity. But this exchange-ratio may express either the real
-magnitude of that commodity’s value, or the quantity of gold deviating from that value, for
-which, according to circumstances, it may be parted with. The possibility, therefore, of
-quantitative incongruity between price and magnitude of value, or the deviation of the former
-from the latter, is inherent in the price-form itself. This is no defect, but, on the contrary,
-admirably adapts the price-form to a mode of production whose inherent laws impose themselves
-only as the mean of apparently lawless irregularities that compensate one another.
-The price-form, however, is not only compatible with the possibility of a quantitative incongruity
-between magnitude of value and price, i.e., between the former and its expression in money, but it
-may also conceal a qualitative inconsistency, so much so, that, although money is nothing but the
-value-form of commodities, price ceases altogether to express value. Objects that in themselves
-are no commodities, such as conscience, honour, &c., are capable of being offered for sale by
-their holders, and of thus acquiring, through their price, the form of commodities. Hence an
-object may have a price without having value. The price in that case is imaginary, like certain
-quantities in mathematics. On the other hand, the imaginary price-form may sometimes conceal
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-either a direct or indirect real value-relation; for instance, the price of uncultivated land, which is
-without value, because no human labour has been incorporated in it.
-Price, like relative value in general, expresses the value of a commodity (e.g., a ton of iron), by
-stating that a given quantity of the equivalent (e.g., an ounce of gold), is directly exchangeable for
-iron. But it by no means states the converse, that iron is directly exchangeable for gold. In order,
-therefore, that a commodity may in practice act effectively as exchange-value, it must quit its
-bodily shape, must transform itself from mere imaginary into real gold, although to the
-commodity such transubstantiation may be more difficult than to the Hegelian “concept,” the
-transition from “necessity” to “freedom,” or to a lobster the casting of his shell, or to Saint
-Jerome the putting off of the old Adam.15 Though a commodity may, side by side with its actual
-form (iron, for instance), take in our imagination the form of gold, yet it cannot at one and the
-same time actually be both iron and gold. To fix its price, it suffices to equate it to gold in
-imagination. But to enable it to render to its owner the service of a universal equivalent, it must
-be actually replaced by gold. If the owner of the iron were to go to the owner of some other
-commodity offered for exchange, and were to refer him to the price of the iron as proof that it was
-already money, he would get the same answer as St. Peter gave in heaven to Dante, when the
-latter recited the creed –
-“Assad bene e trascorsa
-D’esta moneta gia la lega e’l peso,
-Ma dimmi se tu l’hai nella tua borsa.”
-A price therefore implies both that a commodity is exchangeable for money, and also that it must
-be so exchanged. On the other hand, gold serves as an ideal measure of value, only because it has
-already, in the process of exchange, established itself as the money-commodity. Under the ideal
-measure of values there lurks the hard cash.
-Section 2: The Medium of Circulation
-A. The Metamorphosis of Commodities
-We saw in a former chapter that the exchange of commodities implies contradictory and mutually
-exclusive conditions. The differentiation of commodities into commodities and money does not
-sweep away these inconsistencies, but develops a modus vivendi, a form in which they can exist
-side by side. This is generally the way in which real contradictions are reconciled. For instance, it
-is a contradiction to depict one body as constantly falling towards another, and as, at the same
-time, constantly flying away from it. The ellipse is a form of motion which, while allowing this
-contradiction to go on, at the same time reconciles it.
-In so far as exchange is a process, by which commodities are transferred from hands in which
-they are non-use-values, to hands in which they become use-values, it is a social circulation of
-matter. The product of one form of useful labour replaces that of another. When once a
-commodity has found a resting-place, where it can serve as a use-value, it falls out of the sphere
-of exchange into that of consumption. But the former sphere alone interests us at present. We
-have, therefore, now to consider exchange from a formal point of view; to investigate the change
-of form or metamorphosis of commodities which effectuates the social circulation of matter.
-The comprehension of this change of form is, as a rule, very imperfect. The cause of this
-imperfection is, apart from indistinct notions of value itself, that every change of form in a
-commodity results from the exchange of two commodities, an ordinary one and the money-
-commodity. If we keep in view the material fact alone that a commodity has been exchanged for
-gold, we overlook the very thing that we ought to observe – namely, what has happened to the
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-form of the commodity. We overlook the facts that gold, when a mere commodity, is not money,
-and that when other commodities express their prices in gold, this gold is but the money-form of
-those commodities themselves.
-Commodities, first of all, enter into the process of exchange just as they are. The process then
-differentiates them into commodities and money, and thus produces an external opposition
-corresponding to the internal opposition inherent in them, as being at once use-values and values.
-Commodities as use-values now stand opposed to money as exchange-value. On the other hand,
-both opposing sides are commodities, unities of use-value and value. But this unity of differences
-manifests itself at two opposite poles, and at each pole in an opposite way. Being poles they are
-as necessarily opposite as they are connected. On the one side of the equation we have an
-ordinary commodity, which is in reality a use-value. Its value is expressed only ideally in its
-price, by which it is equated to its opponent, the gold, as to the real embodiment of its value. On
-the other hand, the gold, in its metallic reality, ranks as the embodiment of value, as money. Gold,
-as gold, is exchange-value itself. As to its use-value, that has only an ideal existence, represented
-by the series of expressions of relative value in which it stands face to face with all other
-commodities, the sum of whose uses makes up the sum of the various uses of gold. These
-antagonistic forms of commodities are the real forms in which the process of their exchange
-moves and takes place.
-Let us now accompany the owner of some commodity – say, our old friend the weaver of linen –
-to the scene of action, the market. His 20 yards of linen has a definite price, £2. He exchanges it
-for the £2, and then, like a man of the good old stamp that he is, he parts with the £2 for a family
-Bible of the same price. The linen, which in his eyes is a mere commodity, a depository of value,
-he alienates in exchange for gold, which is the linen’s value-form, and this form he again parts
-with for another commodity, the Bible, which is destined to enter his house as an object of utility
-and of edification to its inmates. The exchange becomes an accomplished fact by two
-metamorphoses of opposite yet supplementary character – the conversion of the commodity into
-money, and the re-conversion of the money into a commodity.16 The two phases of this
-metamorphosis are both of them distinct transactions of the weaver – selling, or the exchange of
-the commodity for money; buying, or the exchange of the money for a commodity; and, the unity
-of the two acts, selling in order to buy.
-The result of the whole transaction, as regards the weaver, is this, that instead of being in
-possession of the linen, he now has the Bible; instead of his original commodity, he now
-possesses another of the same value but of different utility. In like manner he procures his other
-means of subsistence and means of production. From his point of view, the whole process
-effectuates nothing more than the exchange of the product of his labour for the product of some
-one else’s, nothing more than an exchange of products.
-The exchange of commodities is therefore accompanied by the following changes in their form.
-Commodity – Money – Commodity.
-C–––––– M ––––––C.
-The result of the whole process is, so far as concerns the objects themselves, C – C, the exchange
-of one commodity for another, the circulation of materialised social labour. When this result is
-attained, the process is at an end.
-C – M. First metamorphosis, or sale
-The leap taken by value from the body of the commodity, into the body of the gold, is, as I have
-elsewhere called it, the salto mortale of the commodity. If it falls short, then, although the
-commodity itself is not harmed, its owner decidedly is. The social division of labour causes his
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-labour to be as one-sided as his wants are many-sided. This is precisely the reason why the
-product of his labour serves him solely as exchange-value. But it cannot acquire the properties of
-a socially recognised universal equivalent, except by being converted into money. That money,
-however, is in some one else’s pocket. In order to entice the money out of that pocket, our
-friend’s commodity must, above all things, be a use-value to the owner of the money. For this, it
-is necessary that the labour expended upon it, be of a kind that is socially useful, of a kind that
-constitutes a branch of the social division of labour. But division of labour is a system of
-production which has grown up spontaneously and continues to grow behind the backs of the
-producers. The commodity to be exchanged may possibly be the product of some new kind of
-labour, that pretends to satisfy newly arisen requirements, or even to give rise itself to new
-requirements. A particular operation, though yesterday, perhaps, forming one out of the many
-operations conducted by one producer in creating a given commodity, may to-day separate itself
-from this connexion, may establish itself as an independent branch of labour and send its
-incomplete product to market as an independent commodity. The circumstances may or may not
-be ripe for such a separation. To-day the product satisfies a social want. Tomorrow the article
-may, either altogether or partially, be superseded by some other appropriate product. Moreover,
-although our weaver’s labour may be a recognised branch of the social division of labour, yet that
-fact is by no means sufficient to guarantee the utility of his 20 yards of linen. If the community’s
-want of linen, and such a want has a limit like every other want, should already be saturated by
-the products of rival weavers, our friend’s product is superfluous, redundant, and consequently
-useless. Although people do not look a gift-horse in the mouth, our friend does not frequent the
-market for the purpose of making presents. But suppose his product turn out a real use-value, and
-thereby attracts money? The question arises, how much will it attract? No doubt the answer is
-already anticipated in the price of the article, in the exponent of the magnitude of its value. We
-leave out of consideration here any accidental miscalculation of value by our friend, a mistake
-that is soon rectified in the market. We suppose him to have spent on his product only that
-amount of labour-time that is on an average socially necessary. The price then, is merely the
-money-name of the quantity of social labour realised in his commodity. But without the leave,
-and behind the back, of our weaver, the old-fashioned mode of weaving undergoes a change. The
-labour-time that yesterday was without doubt socially necessary to the production of a yard of
-linen, ceases to be so to-day, a fact which the owner of the money is only too eager to prove from
-the prices quoted by our friend’s competitors. Unluckily for him, weavers are not few and far
-between. Lastly, suppose that every piece of linen in the market contains no more labour-time
-than is socially necessary. In spite of this, all these pieces taken as a whole, may have had
-superfluous labour-time spent upon them. If the market cannot stomach the whole quantity at the
-normal price of 2 shillings a yard, this proves that too great a portion of the total labour of the
-community has been expended in the form of weaving. The effect is the same as if each
-individual weaver had expended more labour-time upon his particular product than is socially
-necessary. Here we may say, with the German proverb: caught together, hung together. All the
-linen in the market counts but as one article of commerce, of which each piece is only an aliquot
-part. And as a matter of fact, the value also of each single yard is but the materialised form of the
-same definite and socially fixed quantity of homogeneous human labour. 17
-We see then, commodities are in love with money, but “the course of true love never did run
-smooth.” The quantitative division of labour is brought about in exactly the same spontaneous
-and accidental manner as its qualitative division. The owners of commodities therefore find out,
-that the same division of labour that turns them into independent private producers, also frees the
-social process of production and the relations of the individual producers to each other within that
-process, from all dependence on the will of those producers, and that the seeming mutual
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-independence of the individuals is supplemented by a system of general and mutual dependence
-through or by means of the products.
-The division of labour converts the product of labour into a commodity, and thereby makes
-necessary its further conversion into money. At the same time it also makes the accomplishment
-of this transubstantiation quite accidental. Here, however, we are only concerned with the
-phenomenon in its integrity, and we therefore assume its progress to be normal. Moreover, if the
-conversion take place at all, that is, if the commodity be not absolutely unsaleable, its
-metamorphosis does take place although the price realised may be abnormally above or below the
-value.
-The seller has his commodity replaced by gold, the buyer has his gold replaced by a commodity.
-The fact which here stares us in the face is, that a commodity and gold, 20 yards of linen and £2,
-have changed hands and places, in other words, that they have been exchanged. But for what is
-the commodity exchanged? For the shape assumed by its own value, for the universal equivalent.
-And for what is the gold exchanged? For a particular form of its own use-value. Why does gold
-take the form of money face to face with the linen? Because the linen’s price of £2, its
-denomination in money, has already equated the linen to gold in its character of money. A
-commodity strips off its original commodity-form on being alienated, i.e., on the instant its use-
-value actually attracts the gold, that before existed only ideally in its price. The realisation of a
-commodity’s price, or of its ideal value-form, is therefore at the same time the realisation of the
-ideal use-value of money; the conversion of a commodity into money, is the simultaneous
-conversion of money into a commodity. The apparently single process is in reality a double one.
-From the pole of the commodity-owner it is a sale, from the opposite pole of the money-owner, it
-is a purchase. In other words, a sale is a purchase, C–M is also M–C.18
-Up to this point we have considered men in only one economic capacity, that of owners of
-commodities, a capacity in which they appropriate the produce of the labour of others, by
-alienating that of their own labour. Hence, for one commodity-owner to meet with another who
-has money, it is necessary, either, that the product of the labour of the latter person, the buyer,
-should be in itself money, should be gold, the material of which money consists, or that his
-product should already have changed its skin and have stripped off its original form of a useful
-object. In order that it may play the part of money, gold must of course enter the market at some
-point or other. This point is to be found at the source of production of the metal, at which place
-gold is bartered, as the immediate product of labour, for some other product of equal value. From
-that moment it always represents the realised price of some commodity.19 Apart from its
-exchange for other commodities at the source of its production, gold, in whose-so-ever hands it
-may be, is the transformed shape of some commodity alienated by its owner; it is the product of a
-sale or of the first metamorphosis C–M.20 Gold, as we saw, became ideal money, or a measure of
-values, in consequence of all commodities measuring their values by it, and thus contrasting it
-ideally with their natural shape as useful objects, and making it the shape of their value. It became
-real money, by the general alienation of commodities, by actually changing places with their
-natural forms as useful objects, and thus becoming in reality the embodiment of their values.
-When they assume this money-shape, commodities strip off every trace of their natural use-value,
-and of the particular kind of labour to which they owe their creation, in order to transform
-themselves into the uniform, socially recognised incarnation of homogeneous human labour. We
-cannot tell from the mere look of a piece of money, for what particular commodity it has been
-exchanged. Under their money-form all commodities look alike. Hence, money may be dirt,
-although dirt is not money. We will assume that the two gold pieces, in consideration of which
-our weaver has parted with his linen, are the metamorphosed shape of a quarter of wheat. The
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-sale of the linen, C–M, is at the same time its purchase, M–C. But the sale is the first act of a
-process that ends with a transaction of an opposite nature, namely, the purchase of a Bible; the
-purchase of the linen, on the other hand, ends a movement that began with a transaction of an
-opposite nature, namely, with the sale of the wheat. C–M (linen–money), which is the first phase
-of C–M–C (linen–money–Bible), is also M–C (money–linen), the last phase of another movement
-C–M–C (wheat–money–linen). The first metamorphosis of one commodity, its transformation
-from a commodity into money, is therefore also invariably the second metamorphosis of some
-other commodity, the retransformation of the latter from money into a commodity.21
-M–C, or purchase.
-The second and concluding metamorphosis of a commodity
-Because money is the metamorphosed shape of all other commodities, the result of their general
-alienation, for this reason it is alienable itself without restriction or condition. It reads all prices
-backwards, and thus, so to say, depicts itself in the bodies of all other commodities, which offer
-to it the material for the realisation of its own use-value. At the same time the prices, wooing
-glances cast at money by commodities, define the limits of its convertibility, by pointing to its
-quantity. Since every commodity, on becoming money, disappears as a commodity, it is
-impossible to tell from the money itself, how it got into the hands of its possessor, or what article
-has been changed into it. Non olet, from whatever source it may come. Representing on the one
-hand a sold commodity, it represents on the other a commodity to be bought.22
-M–C, a purchase, is, at the same time, C–M, a sale; the concluding metamorphosis of one
-commodity is the first metamorphosis of another. With regard to our weaver, the life of his
-commodity ends with the Bible, into which he has reconverted his £2. But suppose the seller of
-the Bible turns the £2 set free by the weaver into brandy M–C, the concluding phase of C–M–C
-(linen–money–Bible), is also C–M, the first phase of C–M–C (Bible–money–brandy). The
-producer of a particular commodity has that one article alone to offer; this he sells very often in
-large quantities, but his many and various wants compel him to split up the price realised, the sum
-of money set free, into numerous purchases. Hence a sale leads to many purchases of various
-articles. The concluding metamorphosis of a commodity thus constitutes an aggregation of first
-metamorphoses of various other commodities.
-If we now consider the completed metamorphosis of a commodity, as a whole, it appears in the
-first place, that it is made up of two opposite and complementary movements, C–M and M–C.
-These two antithetical transmutations of a commodity are brought about by two antithetical social
-acts on the part of the owner, and these acts in their turn stamp the character of the economic
-parts played by him. As the person who makes a sale, he is a seller; as the person who makes a
-purchase, he is a buyer. But just as, upon every such transmutation of a commodity, its two forms,
-commodity-form and money-form, exist simultaneously but at opposite poles, so every seller has
-a buyer opposed to him, and every buyer a seller. While one particular commodity is going
-through its two transmutations in succession, from a commodity into money and from money into
-another commodity, the owner of the commodity changes in succession his part from that of
-seller to that of buyer. These characters of seller and buyer are therefore not permanent, but attach
-themselves in turns to the various persons engaged in the circulation of commodities.
-The complete metamorphosis of a commodity, in its simplest form, implies four extremes, and
-three dramatic personae. First, a commodity comes face to face with money; the latter is the form
-taken by the value of the former, and exists in all its hard reality, in the pocket of the buyer. A
-commodity-owner is thus brought into contact with a possessor of money. So soon, now, as the
-commodity has been changed into money, the money becomes its transient equivalent-form, the
-use-value of which equivalent-form is to be found in the bodies of other commodities. Money, the
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-final term of the first transmutation, is at the same time the starting-point for the second. The
-person who is a seller in the first transaction thus becomes a buyer in the second, in which a third
-commodity-owner appears on the scene as a seller.23
-The two phases, each inverse to the other, that make up the metamorphosis of a commodity
-constitute together a circular movement, a circuit: commodity-form, stripping off of this form,
-and return to the commodity-form. No doubt, the commodity appears here under two different
-aspects. At the starting-point it is not a use-value to its owner; at the finishing point it is. So, too,
-the money appears in the first phase as a solid crystal of value, a crystal into which the
-commodity eagerly solidifies, and in the second, dissolves into the mere transient equivalent-form
-destined to be replaced by a use-value.
-The two metamorphoses constituting the circuit are at the same time two inverse partial
-metamorphoses of two other commodities. One and the same commodity, the linen, opens the
-series of its own metamorphoses, and completes the metamorphosis of another (the wheat). In the
-first phase or sale, the linen plays these two parts in its own person. But, then, changed into gold,
-it completes its own second and final metamorphosis, and helps at the same time to accomplish
-the first metamorphosis of a third commodity. Hence the circuit made by one commodity in the
-course of its metamorphoses is inextricably mixed up with the circuits of other commodities. The
-total of all the different circuits constitutes the circulation of commodities.
-The circulation of commodities differs from the direct exchange of products (barter), not only in
-form, but in substance. Only consider the course of events. The weaver has, as a matter of fact,
-exchanged his linen for a Bible, his own commodity for that of some one else. But this is true
-only so far as he himself is concerned. The seller of the Bible, who prefers something to warm his
-inside, no more thought of exchanging his Bible for linen than our weaver knew that wheat had
-been exchanged for his linen. B’s commodity replaces that of A, but A and B do not mutually
-exchange those commodities. It may, of course, happen that A and B make simultaneous
-purchases, the one from the other; but such exceptional transactions are by no means the
-necessary result of the general conditions of the circulation of commodities. We see here, on the
-one hand, how the exchange of commodities breaks through all local and personal bounds
-inseparable from direct barter, and develops the circulation of the products of social labour; and
-on the other hand, how it develops a whole network of social relations spontaneous in their
-growth and entirely beyond the control of the actors. It is only because the farmer has sold his
-wheat that the weaver is enabled to sell his linen, only because the weaver has sold his linen that
-our Hotspur is enabled to sell his Bible, and only because the latter has sold the water of
-everlasting life that the distiller is enabled to sell his eau-de-vie, and so on.
-The process of circulation, therefore, does not, like direct barter of products, become extinguished
-upon the use-values changing places and hands. The money does not vanish on dropping out of
-the circuit of the metamorphosis of a given commodity. It is constantly being precipitated into
-new places in the arena of circulation vacated by other commodities. In the complete
-metamorphosis of the linen, for example, linen – money – Bible, the linen first falls out of
-circulation, and money steps into its place. Then the Bible falls out of circulation, and again
-money takes its place. When one commodity replaces another, the money-commodity always
-sticks to the hands of some third person.24 Circulation sweats money from every pore.
-Nothing can be more childish than the dogma, that because every sale is a purchase, and every
-purchase a sale, therefore the circulation of commodities necessarily implies an equilibrium of
-sales and purchases. If this means that the number of actual sales is equal to the number of
-purchases, it is mere tautology. But its real purport is to prove that every seller brings his buyer to
-market with him. Nothing of the kind. The sale and the purchase constitute one identical act, an
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-exchange between a commodity-owner and an owner of money, between two persons as opposed
-to each other as the two poles of a magnet. They form two distinct acts, of polar and opposite
-characters, when performed by one single person. Hence the identity of sale and purchase implies
-that the commodity is useless, if, on being thrown into the alchemistical retort of circulation, it
-does not come out again in the shape of money; if, in other words, it cannot be sold by its owner,
-and therefore be bought by the owner of the money. That identity further implies that the
-exchange, if it does take place, constitutes a period of rest, an interval, long or short, in the life of
-the commodity. Since the first metamorphosis of a commodity is at once a sale and a purchase, it
-is also an independent process in itself. The purchaser has the commodity, the seller has the
-money, i.e., a commodity ready to go into circulation at any time. No one can sell unless some
-one else purchases. But no one is forthwith bound to purchase, because he has just sold.
-Circulation bursts through all restrictions as to time, place, and individuals, imposed by direct
-barter, and this it effects by splitting up, into the antithesis of a sale and a purchase, the direct
-identity that in barter does exist between the alienation of one’s own and the acquisition of some
-other man’s product. To say that these two independent and antithetical acts have an intrinsic
-unity, are essentially one, is the same as to say that this intrinsic oneness expresses itself in an
-external antithesis. If the interval in time between the two complementary phases of the complete
-metamorphosis of a commodity become too great, if the split between the sale and the purchase
-become too pronounced, the intimate connexion between them, their oneness, asserts itself by
-producing – a crisis. The antithesis, use-value and value; the contradictions that private labour is
-bound to manifest itself as direct social labour, that a particularised concrete kind of labour has to
-pass for abstract human labour; the contradiction between the personification of objects and the
-representation of persons by things; all these antitheses and contradictions, which are immanent
-in commodities, assert themselves, and develop their modes of motion, in the antithetical phases
-of the metamorphosis of a commodity. These modes therefore imply the possibility, and no more
-than the possibility, of crises. The conversion of this mere possibility into a reality is the result of
-a long series of relations, that, from our present standpoint of simple circulation, have as yet no
-existence. 25
-B. The currency 26 of money
-The change of form, C–M–C, by which the circulation of the material products of labour is
-brought about, requires that a given value in the shape of a commodity shall begin the process,
-and shall, also in the shape of a commodity, end it. The movement of the commodity is therefore
-a circuit. On the other hand, the form of this movement precludes a circuit from being made by
-the money. The result is not the return of the money, but its continued removal further and further
-away from its starting-point. So long as the seller sticks fast to his money, which is the
-transformed shape of his commodity, that commodity is still in the first phase of its
-metamorphosis, and has completed only half its course. But so soon as he completes the process,
-so soon as he supplements his sale by a purchase, the money again leaves the hands of its
-possessor. It is true that if the weaver, after buying the Bible, sell more linen, money comes back
-into his hands. But this return is not owing to the circulation of the first 20 yards of linen; that
-circulation resulted in the money getting into the hands of the seller of the Bible. The return of
-money into the hands of the weaver is brought about only by the renewal or repetition of the
-process of circulation with a fresh commodity, which renewed process ends with the same result
-as its predecessor did. Hence the movement directly imparted to money by the circulation of
-commodities takes the form of a constant motion away from its starting-point, of a course from
-the hands of one commodity-owner into those of another. This course constitutes its currency
-(cours de la monnaie).
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-The currency of money is the constant and monotonous repetition of the same process. The
-commodity is always in the hands of the seller; the money, as a means of purchase, always in the
-hands of the buyer. And money serves as a means of purchase by realising the price of the
-commodity. This realisation transfers the commodity from the seller to the buyer and removes the
-money from the hands of the buyer into those of the seller, where it again goes through the same
-process with another commodity. That this one-sided character of the money’s motion arises out
-of the two-sided character of the commodity’s motion, is a circumstance that is veiled over. The
-very nature of the circulation of commodities begets the opposite appearance. The first
-metamorphosis of a commodity is visibly, not only the money’s movement, but also that of the
-commodity itself; in the second metamorphosis, on the contrary, the movement appears to us as
-the movement of the money alone. In the first phase of its circulation the commodity changes
-place with the money. Thereupon the commodity, under its aspect of a useful object, falls out of
-circulation into consumption.27 In its stead we have its value-shape – the money. It then goes
-through the second phase of its circulation, not under its own natural shape, but under the shape
-of money. The continuity of the movement is therefore kept up by the money alone, and the same
-movement that as regards the commodity consists of two processes of an antithetical character, is,
-when considered as the movement of the money, always one and the same process, a continued
-change of places with ever fresh commodities. Hence the result brought about by the circulation
-of commodities, namely, the replacing of one commodity by another, takes the appearance of
-having been effected not by means of the change of form of the commodities but rather by the
-money acting as a medium of circulation, by an action that circulates commodities, to all
-appearance motionless in themselves, and transfers them from hands in which they are non-use-
-values, to hands in which they are use-values; and that in a direction constantly opposed to the
-direction of the money. The latter is continually withdrawing commodities from circulation and
-stepping into their places, and in thus way continually moving further and further from its
-starting-point. Hence although the movement of the money is merely the expression of the
-circulation of commodities, yet the contrary appears to be the actual fact, and the circulation of
-commodities seems to be the result of the movement of the money.28
-Again, money functions as a means of circulation only because in it the values of commodities
-have independent reality. Hence its movement, as the medium of circulation, is, in fact, merely
-the movement of commodities while changing their forms. This fact must therefore make itself
-plainly visible in the currency of money. Thus the linen for instance, first of all changes its
-commodity-form into its money-form. The second term of its first metamorphosis, C–M, the
-money form, then becomes the first term of its final metamorphosis, M–C, its re-conversion into
-the Bible. But each of these two changes of form is accomplished by an exchange between
-commodity and money, by their reciprocal displacement. The same pieces of coin come into the
-seller’s hand as the alienated form of the commodity and leave it as the absolutely alienable form
-of the commodity. They are displaced twice. The first metamorphosis of the linen puts these coins
-into the weaver’s pocket, the second draws them out of it. The two inverse changes undergone by
-the same commodity are reflected in the displacement, twice repeated, but in opposite directions,
-of the same pieces of coin.
-If, on the contrary, only one phase of the metamorphosis is gone through, if there are only sales or
-only purchases, then a given piece of money changes its place only once. Its second change of
-place always expresses the second metamorphosis of the commodity, its re-conversion from
-money. The frequent repetition of the displacement of the same coins reflects not only the series
-of metamorphoses that a single commodity has gone through, but also the intertwining of the
-innumerable metamorphoses in the world of commodities in general. It is a matter of course, that
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-all this is applicable to the simple circulation of commodities alone, the only form that we are
-now considering.
-Every commodity, when it first steps into circulation, and undergoes its first change of form, does
-so only to fall out of circulation again and to be replaced by other commodities. Money, on the
-contrary, as the medium of circulation, keeps continually within the sphere of circulation, and
-moves about in it. The question therefore arises, how much money this sphere constantly
-absorbs?
-In a given country there take place every day at the same time, but in different localities,
-numerous one-sided metamorphoses of commodities, or, in other words, numerous sales and
-numerous purchases. The commodities are equated beforehand in imagination, by their prices, to
-definite quantities of money. And since, in the form of circulation now under consideration,
-money and commodities always come bodily face to face, one at the positive pole of purchase,
-the other at the negative pole of sale, it is clear that the amount of the means of circulation
-required, is determined beforehand by the sum of the prices of all these commodities. As a matter
-of fact, the money in reality represents the quantity or sum of gold ideally expressed beforehand
-by the sum of the prices of the commodities. The equality of these two sums is therefore self-
-evident. We know, however, that, the values of commodities remaining constant, their prices vary
-with the value of gold (the material of money), rising in proportion as it falls, and falling in
-proportion as it rises. Now if, in consequence of such a rise or fall in the value of gold, the sum of
-the prices of commodities fall or rise, the quantity of money in currency must fall or rise to the
-same extent. The change in the quantity of the circulating medium is, in this case, it is true,
-caused by the money itself, yet not in virtue of its function as a medium of circulation, but of its
-function as a measure of value. First, the price of the commodities varies inversely as the value of
-the money, and then the quantity of the medium of circulation varies directly as the price of the
-commodities. Exactly the same thing would happen if, for instance, instead of the value of gold
-falling, gold were replaced by silver as the measure of value, or if, instead of the value of silver
-rising, gold were to thrust silver out from being the measure of value. In the one case, more silver
-would be current than gold was before; in the other case, less gold would be current than silver
-was before. In each case the value of the material of money, i.e., the value of the commodity that
-serves as the measure of value, would have undergone a change, and therefore so, too, would the
-prices of commodities which express their values in money, and so, too, would the quantity of
-money current whose function it is to realise those prices. We have already seen, that the sphere
-of circulation has an opening through which gold (or the material of money generally) enters into
-it as a commodity with a given value. Hence, when money enters on its functions as a measure of
-value, when it expresses prices, its value is already determined. If now its value fall, this fact is
-first evidenced by a change in the prices of those commodities that are directly bartered for the
-precious metals at the sources of their production. The greater part of all other commodities,
-especially in the imperfectly developed stages of civil society, will continue for a long time to be
-estimated by the former antiquated and illusory value of the measure of value. Nevertheless, one
-commodity infects another through their common value-relation, so that their prices, expressed in
-gold or in silver, gradually settle down into the proportions determined by their comparative
-values, until finally the values of all commodities are estimated in terms of the new value of the
-metal that constitutes money. This process is accompanied by the continued increase in the
-quantity of the precious metals, an increase caused by their streaming in to replace the articles
-directly bartered for them at their sources of production. In proportion therefore as commodities
-in general acquire their true prices, in proportion as their values become estimated according to
-the fallen value of the precious metal, in the same proportion the quantity of that metal necessary
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-for realising those new prices is provided beforehand. A one-sided observation of the results that
-followed upon the discovery of fresh supplies of gold and silver, led some economists in the 17th,
-and particularly in the 18th century, to the false conclusion, that the prices of commodities had
-gone up in consequence of the increased quantity of gold and silver serving as means of
-circulation. Henceforth we shall consider the value of gold to be given, as, in fact, it is
-momentarily, whenever we estimate the price of a commodity.
-On this supposition then, the quantity of the medium of circulation is determined by the sum of
-the prices that have to be realised. If now we further suppose the price of each commodity to be
-given, the sum of the prices clearly depends on the mass of commodities in circulation. It requires
-but little racking of brains to comprehend that if one quarter of wheat costs £2,100 quarters will
-cost £200, 200 quarters £400, and so on, that consequently the quantity of money that changes
-place with the wheat, when sold, must increase with the quantity of that wheat.
-If the mass of commodities remain constant, the quantity of circulating money varies with the
-fluctuations in the prices of those commodities. It increases and diminishes because the sum of
-the prices increases or diminishes in consequence of the change of price. To produce this effect, it
-is by no means requisite that the prices of all commodities should rise or fall simultaneously. A
-rise or a fall in the prices of a number of leading articles, is sufficient in the one case to increase,
-in the other to diminish, the sum of the prices of all commodities, and, therefore, to put more or
-less money in circulation. Whether the change in the price correspond to an actual change of
-value in the commodities, or whether it be the result of mere fluctuations in market-prices, the
-effect on the quantity of the medium of circulation remains the same. Suppose the following
-articles to be sold or partially metamorphosed simultaneously in different localities: say, one
-quarter of wheat, 20 yards of linen, one Bible, and 4 gallons of brandy. If the price of each article
-be £2, and the sum of the prices to be realised be consequently £8, it follows that £8 in money
-must go into circulation. If, on the other hand, these same articles are links in the following chain
-of metamorphoses: 1 quarter of wheat – £2 – 20 yards of linen – £2 – 1 Bible – £2 – 4 gallons of
-brandy – £2, a chain that is already well known to us, in that case the £2 cause the different
-commodities to circulate one after the other, and after realising their prices successively, and
-therefore the sum of those prices, £8, they come to rest at last in the pocket of the distiller. The £2
-thus make four moves. This repeated change of place of the same pieces of money corresponds to
-the double change in form of the commodities, to their motion in opposite directions through two
-stages of circulation. and to the interlacing of the metamorphoses of different commodities.29
-These antithetic and complementary phases, of which the process of metamorphosis consists, are
-gone through, not simultaneously, but successively. Time is therefore required for the completion
-of the series. Hence the velocity of the currency of money is measured by the number of moves
-made by a given piece of money in a given time. Suppose the circulation of the 4 articles takes a
-day. The sum of the prices to be realised in the day is £8, the number of moves of the two pieces
-of money is four, and the quantity of money circulating is £2. Hence, for a given interval of time
-during the process of circulation, we have the following relation: the quantity of money
-functioning as the circulating medium is equal to the sum of the prices of the commodities
-divided by the number of moves made by coins of the same denomination. This law holds
-generally.
-The total circulation of commodities in a given country during a given period is made up on the
-one hand of numerous isolated and simultaneous partial metamorphoses, sales which are at the
-same time purchases, in which each coin changes its place only once, or makes only one move;
-on the other hand, of numerous distinct series of metamorphoses partly running side by side, and
-partly coalescing with each other, in each of which series each coin makes a number of moves,
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-the number being greater or less according to circumstances. The total number of moves made by
-all the circulating coins of one denomination being given, we can arrive at the average number of
-moves made by a single coin of that denomination, or at the average velocity of the currency of
-money. The quantity of money thrown into the circulation at the beginning of each day is of
-course determined by the sum of the prices of all the commodities circulating simultaneously side
-by side. But once in circulation, coins are, so to say, made responsible for one another. If the one
-increase its velocity, the other either retards its own, or altogether falls out of circulation; for the
-circulation can absorb only such a quantity of gold as when multiplied by the mean number of
-moves made by one single coin or element, is equal to the sum of the prices to be realised. Hence
-if the number of moves made by the separate pieces increase, the total number of those pieces in
-circulation diminishes. If the number of the moves diminish, the total number of pieces increases.
-Since the quantity of money capable of being absorbed by the circulation is given for a given
-mean velocity of currency, all that is necessary in order to abstract a given number of sovereigns
-from the circulation is to throw the same number of one-pound notes into it, a trick well known to
-all bankers.
-Just as the currency of money, generally considered, is but a reflex of the circulation of
-commodities, or of the antithetical metamorphoses they undergo, so, too, the velocity of that
-currency reflects the rapidity with which commodities change their forms, the continued
-interlacing of one series of metamorphoses with another, the hurried social interchange of matter,
-the rapid disappearance of commodities from the sphere of circulation, and the equally rapid
-substitution of fresh ones in their places. Hence, in the velocity of the currency we have the fluent
-unity of the antithetical and complementary phases, the unity of the conversion of the useful
-aspect of commodities into their value-aspect, and their re-conversion from the latter aspect to the
-former, or the unity of the two processes of sale and purchase. On the other hand, the retardation
-of the currency reflects the separation of these two processes into isolated antithetical phases,
-reflects the stagnation in the change of form, and therefore, in the social interchange of matter.
-The circulation itself, of course, gives no clue to the origin of this stagnation; it merely puts in
-evidence the phenomenon itself. The general public, who, simultaneously with the retardation of
-the currency, see money appear and disappear less frequently at the periphery of circulation,
-naturally attribute this retardation to a quantitative deficiency in the circulating medium.30
-The total quantity of money functioning during a given period as the circulating medium, is
-determined, on the one hand, by the sum of the prices of the circulating commodities, and on the
-other hand, by the rapidity with which the antithetical phases of the metamorphoses follow one
-another. On this rapidity depends what proportion of the sum of the prices can, on the average, be
-realised by each single coin. But the sum of the prices of the circulating commodities depends on
-the quantity, as well as on the prices, of the commodities. These three factors, however, state of
-prices, quantity of circulating commodities, and velocity of money-currency, are all variable.
-Hence, the sum of the prices to be realised, and consequently the quantity of the circulating
-medium depending on that sum, will vary with the numerous variations of these three factors in
-combination. Of these variations we shall consider those alone that have been the most important
-in the history of prices.
-While prices remain constant, the quantity of the circulating medium may increase owing to the
-number of circulating commodities increasing, or to the velocity of currency decreasing, or to a
-combination of the two. On the other hand the quantity of the circulating medium may decrease
-with a decreasing number of commodities, or with an increasing rapidity of their circulation.
-With a general rise in the prices of commodities, the quantity of the circulating medium will
-remain constant, provided the number of commodities in circulation decrease proportionally to
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-the increase in their prices, or provided the velocity of currency increase at the same rate as prices
-rise, the number of commodities in circulation remaining constant. The quantity of the circulating
-medium may decrease, owing to the number of commodities decreasing more rapidly; or to the
-velocity of currency increasing more rapidly, than prices rise.
-With a general fall in the prices of commodities, the quantity of the circulating medium will
-remain constant, provided the number of commodities increase proportionally to their fall in
-price, or provided the velocity of currency decrease in the same proportion. The quantity of the
-circulating medium will increase, provided the number of commodities increase quicker, or the
-rapidity of circulation decrease quicker, than the prices fall.
-The variations of the different factors may mutually compensate each other, so that
-notwithstanding their continued instability, the sum of the prices to be realised and the quantity of
-money in circulation remain constant; consequently, we find, especially if we take long periods
-into consideration, that the deviations from the average level, of the quantity of money current in
-any country, are much smaller than we should at first sight expect, apart of course from excessive
-perturbations periodically arising from industrial and commercial crises, or less frequently, from
-fluctuations in the value of money.
-The law, that the quantity of the circulating medium is determined by the sum of the prices of the
-commodities circulating, and the average velocity of currency31 may also be stated as follows:
-given the sum of the values of commodities, and the average rapidity of their metamorphoses, the
-quantity of precious metal current as money depends on the value of that precious metal. The
-erroneous opinion that it is, on the contrary, prices that are determined by the quantity of the
-circulating medium, and that the latter depends on the quantity of the precious metals in a
-country;32 this opinion was based by those who first held it, on the absurd hypothesis that
-commodities are without a price, and money without a value, when they first enter into
-circulation, and that, once in the circulation, an aliquot part of the medley of commodities is
-exchanged for an aliquot part of the heap of precious metals.33
-C. Coin and symbols of value
-That money takes the shape of coin, springs from its function as the circulating medium. The
-weight of gold represented in imagination by the prices or money-names of commodities, must
-confront those commodities, within the circulation, in the shape of coins or pieces of gold of a
-given denomination. Coining, like the establishment of a standard of prices, is the business of the
-State. The different national uniforms worn at home by gold and silver as coins, and doffed again
-in the market of the world, indicate the separation between the internal or national spheres of the
-circulation of commodities, and their universal sphere.
-The only difference, therefore, between coin and bullion, is one of shape, and gold can at any
-time pass from one form to the other. 34But no sooner does coin leave the mint, than it
-immediately finds itself on the high-road to the melting pot. During their currency, coins wear
-away, some more, others less. Name and substance, nominal weight and real weight, begin their
-process of separation. Coins of the same denomination become different in value, because they
-are different in weight. The weight of gold fixed upon as the standard of prices, deviates from the
-weight that serves as the circulating medium, and the latter thereby ceases any longer to be a real
-equivalent of the commodities whose prices it realises. The history of coinage during the middle
-ages and down into the 18th century, records the ever renewed confusion arising from this cause.
-The natural tendency of circulation to convert coins into a mere semblance of what they profess
-to be, into a symbol of the weight of metal they are officially supposed to contain, is recognised
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-by modern legislation, which fixes the loss of weight sufficient to demonetise a gold coin, or to
-make it no longer legal tender.
-The fact that the currency of coins itself effects a separation between their nominal and their real
-weight, creating a distinction between them as mere pieces of metal on the one hand, and as coins
-with a definite function on the other – this fact implies the latent possibility of replacing metallic
-coins by tokens of some other material, by symbols serving the same purposes as coins. The
-practical difficulties in the way of coining extremely minute quantities of gold or silver, and the
-circumstance that at first the less precious metal is used as a measure of value instead of the-more
-precious, copper instead of silver, silver instead of gold, and that the less precious circulates as
-money until dethroned by the more precious – all these facts explain the parts historically played
-by silver and copper tokens as substitutes for gold coins. Silver and copper tokens take the place
-of gold in those regions of the circulation where coins pass from hand to hand most rapidly, and
-are subject to the maximum amount of wear and tear. This occurs where sales and purchases on a
-very small scale are continually happening. In order to prevent these satellites from establishing
-themselves permanently in the place of gold, positive enactments determine the extent to which
-they must be compulsorily received as payment instead of gold. The particular tracks pursued by
-the different species of coin in currency, run naturally into each other. The tokens keep company
-with gold, to pay fractional parts of the smallest gold coin; gold is, on the one hand, constantly
-pouring into retail circulation, and on the other hand is as constantly being thrown out again by
-being changed into tokens.35
-The weight of metal in the silver and copper tokens is arbitrarily fixed by law. When in currency,
-they wear away even more rapidly than gold coins. Hence their functions are totally independent
-of their weight, and consequently of all value. The function of gold as coin becomes completely
-independent of the metallic value of that gold. Therefore things that are relatively without value,
-such as paper notes, can serve as coins in its place. This purely symbolic character is to a certain
-extent masked in metal tokens. In paper money it stands out plainly. In fact, ce n’est que le
-premier pas qui coûte.
-We allude here only to inconvertible paper money issued by the State and having compulsory
-circulation. It has its immediate origin in the metallic currency. Money based upon credit implies
-on the other hand conditions, which, from our standpoint of the simple circulation of
-commodities, are as yet totally unknown to us. But we may affirm this much, that just as true
-paper money takes its rise in the function of money as the circulating medium, so money based
-upon credit takes root spontaneously in the function of money as the means of payment.36
-The State puts in circulation bits of paper on which their various denominations, say £1, £5, &c.,
-are printed. In so far as they actually take the place of gold to the same amount, their movement is
-subject to the laws that regulate the currency of money itself. A law peculiar to the circulation of
-paper money can spring up only from the proportion in which that paper money represents gold.
-Such a law exists; stated simply, it is as follows: the issue of paper money must not exceed in
-amount the gold (or silver as the case may be) which would actually circulate if not replaced by
-symbols. Now the quantity of gold which the circulation can absorb, constantly fluctuates about a
-given level. Still, the mass of the circulating medium in a given country never sinks below a
-certain minimum easily ascertained by actual experience. The fact that this minimum mass
-continually undergoes changes in its constituent parts, or that the pieces of gold of which it
-consists are being constantly replaced by fresh ones, causes of course no change either in its
-amount or in the continuity of its circulation. It can therefore be replaced by paper symbols. If, on
-the other hand, all the conduits of circulation were to-day filled with paper money to the full
-extent of their capacity for absorbing money, they might to-morrow be overflowing in
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-consequence of a fluctuation in the circulation of commodities. There would no longer be any
-standard. If the paper money exceed its proper limit, which is the amount in gold coins of the like
-denomination that can actually be current, it would, apart from the danger of falling into general
-disrepute, represent only that quantity of gold, which, in accordance with the laws of the
-circulation of commodities, is required, and is alone capable of being represented by paper. If the
-quantity of paper money issued be double what it ought to be, then, as a matter of fact, £1 would
-be the money-name not of 1/4 of an ounce, but of 1/8 of an ounce of gold. The effect would be
-the same as if an alteration had taken place in the function of gold as a standard of prices. Those
-values that were previously expressed by the price of £1 would now be expressed by the price of
-£2.
-Paper money is a token representing gold or money. The relation between it and the values of
-commodities is this, that the latter are ideally expressed in the same quantities of gold that are
-symbolically represented by the paper. Only in so far as paper money represents gold, which like
-all other commodities has value, is it a symbol of value.37
-Finally, some one may ask why gold is capable of being replaced by tokens that have no value?
-But, as we have already seen, it is capable of being so replaced only in so far as it functions
-exclusively as coin, or as the circulating medium, and as nothing else. Now, money has other
-functions besides this one, and the isolated function of serving as the mere circulating medium is
-not necessarily the only one attached to gold coin, although this is the case with those abraded
-coins that continue to circulate. Each piece of money is a mere coin, or means of circulation, only
-so long as it actually circulates. But this is just the case with that minimum mass of gold, which is
-capable of being replaced by paper money. That mass remains constantly within the sphere of
-circulation, continually functions as a circulating medium, and exists exclusively for that purpose.
-Its movement therefore represents nothing but the continued alternation of the inverse phases of
-the metamorphosis C–M–C, phases in which commodities confront their value-forms, only to
-disappear again immediately. The independent existence of the exchange-value of a commodity is
-here a transient apparition, by means of which the commodity is immediately replaced by another
-commodity. Hence, in this process which continually makes money pass from hand to hand, the
-mere symbolical existence of money suffices. Its functional existence absorbs, so to say, its
-material existence. Being a transient and objective reflex of the prices of commodities, it serves
-only as a symbol of itself, and is therefore capable of being replaced by a token.38 One thing is,
-however, requisite; this token must have an objective social validity of its own, and this the paper
-symbol acquires by its forced currency. This compulsory action of the State can take effect only
-within that inner sphere of circulation which is coterminous with the territories of the community,
-but it is also only within that sphere that money completely responds to its function of being the
-circulating medium, or becomes coin.
-Section 3: Money
-The commodity that functions as a measure of value, and, either in its own person or by a
-representative, as the medium of circulation, is money. Gold (or silver) is therefore money. It
-functions as money, on the one hand, when it has to be present in its own golden person. It is then
-the money-commodity, neither merely ideal, as in its function of a measure of value, nor capable
-of being represented, as in its function of circulating medium. On the other hand, it also functions
-as money, when by virtue of its function, whether that function be performed in person or by
-representative, it congeals into the sole form of value, the only adequate form of existence of
-exchange-value, in opposition to use-value, represented by all other commodities.
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-A. Hoarding
-The continual movement in circuits of the two antithetical metamorphoses of commodities, or the
-never ceasing alternation of sale and purchase, is reflected in the restless currency of money, or in
-the function that money performs of a perpetuum mobile of circulation. But so soon as the series
-of metamorphoses is interrupted, so soon as sales are not supplemented by subsequent purchases,
-money ceases to be mobilised; it is transformed, as Boisguillebert says, from “meuble” into
-“immeuble,” from movable into immovable, from coin into money.
-With the very earliest development of the circulation of commodities, there is also developed the
-necessity, and the passionate desire, to hold fast the product of the first metamorphosis. This
-product is the transformed shape of the commodity, or its gold-chrysalis.39 Commodities are thus
-sold not for the purpose of buying others, but in order to replace their commodity-form by their
-money-form. From being the mere means of effecting the circulation of commodities, this change
-of form becomes the end and aim. The changed form of the commodity is thus prevented from
-functioning as its unconditionally alienable form, or as its merely transient money-form. The
-money becomes petrified into a hoard, and the seller becomes a hoarder of money.
-In the early stages of the circulation of commodities, it is the surplus use-values alone that are
-converted into money. Gold and silver thus become of themselves social expressions for
-superfluity or wealth. This naïve form of hoarding becomes perpetuated in those communities in
-which the traditional mode of production is carried on for the supply of a fixed and limited circle
-of home wants. It is thus with the people of Asia, and particularly of the East Indies. Vanderlint,
-who fancies that the prices of commodities in a country are determined by the quantity of gold
-and silver to be found in it, asks himself why Indian commodities are so cheap. Answer: Because
-the Hindus bury their money. From 1602 to 1734, he remarks, they buried 150 millions of pounds
-sterling of silver, which originally came from America to Europe.40 In the 10 years from 1856 to
-1866, England exported to India and China £120,000,000 in silver, which had been received in
-exchange for Australian gold. Most of the silver exported to China makes its way to India.
-As the production of commodities further develops, every producer of commodities is compelled
-to make sure of the nexus rerum or the social pledge.41 His wants are constantly making
-themselves felt, and necessitate the continual purchase of other people’s commodities, while the
-production and sale of his own goods require time, and depend upon circumstances. In order then
-to be able to buy without selling, he must have sold previously without buying. This operation,
-conducted on a general scale, appears to imply a contradiction. But the precious metals at the
-sources of their production are directly exchanged for other commodities. And here we have sales
-(by the owners of commodities) without purchases (by the owners of gold or silver). 42And
-subsequent sales, by other producers, unfollowed by purchases, merely bring about the
-distribution of the newly produced precious metals among all the owners of commodities. In this
-way, all along the line of exchange, hoards of gold and silver of varied extent are accumulated.
-With the possibility of holding and storing up exchange-value in the shape of a particular
-commodity, arises also the greed for gold. Along with the extension of circulation, increases the
-power of money, that absolutely social form of wealth ever ready for use. “Gold is a wonderful
-thing! Whoever possesses it is lord of all he wants. By means of gold one can even get souls into
-Paradise.” (Columbus in his letter from Jamaica, 1503.) Since gold does not disclose what has
-been transformed into it, everything, commodity or not, is convertible into gold. Everything
-becomes saleable and buyable. The circulation becomes the great social retort into which
-everything is thrown, to come out again as a gold-crystal. Not even are the bones of saints, and
-still less are more delicate res sacrosanctae, extra commercium hominum able to withstand this
-alchemy.43 Just as every qualitative difference between commodities is extinguished in money,
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-so money, on its side, like the radical leveller that it is, does away with all distinctions.43a But
-money itself is a commodity, an external object, capable of becoming the private property of any
-individual. Thus social power becomes the private power of private persons. The ancients
-therefore denounced money as subversive of the economic and moral order of things.43b Modern
-society, which, soon after its birth, pulled Plutus by the hair of his head from the bowels of the
-earth,44 greets gold as its Holy Grail, as the glittering incarnation of the very principle of its own
-life.
-A commodity, in its capacity of a use-value, satisfies a particular want, and is a particular element
-of material wealth. But the value of a commodity measures the degree of its attraction for all
-other elements of material wealth, and therefore measures the social wealth of its owner. To a
-barbarian owner of commodities, and even to a West-European peasant, value is the same as
-value-form, and therefore, to him the increase in his hoard of gold and silver is an increase in
-value. It is true that the value of money varies, at one time in consequence of a variation in its
-own value, at another, in consequence of a change in the values of commodities. But this, on the
-one hand, does not prevent 200 ounces of gold from still containing more value than 100 ounces,
-nor, on the other hand, does it hinder the actual metallic form of this article from continuing to be
-the universal equivalent form of all other commodities, and the immediate social incarnation of
-all human labour. The desire after hoarding is in its very nature unsatiable. In its qualitative
-aspect, or formally considered, money has no bounds to its efficacy, i.e., it is the universal
-representative of material wealth, because it is directly convertible into any other commodity.
-But, at the same time, every actual sum of money is limited in amount, and, therefore, as a means
-of purchasing, has only a limited efficacy. This antagonism between the quantitative limits of
-money and its qualitative boundlessness, continually acts as a spur to the hoarder in his Sisyphus-
-like labour of accumulating. It is with him as it is with a conqueror who sees in every new
-country annexed, only a new boundary.
-In order that gold may be held as money, and made to form a hoard, it must be prevented from
-circulating, or from transforming itself into a means of enjoyment. The hoarder, therefore, makes
-a sacrifice of the lusts of the flesh to his gold fetish. He acts in earnest up to the Gospel of
-abstention. On the other hand, he can withdraw from circulation no more than what he has thrown
-into it in the shape of commodities. The more he produces, the more he is able to sell. Hard work,
-saving, and avarice are, therefore, his three cardinal virtues, and to sell much and buy little the
-sum of his political economy.45
-By the side of the gross form of a hoard, we find also its aesthetic form in the possession of gold
-and silver articles. This grows with the wealth of civil society. “Soyons riches ou paraissons
-riches” (Diderot).
-In this way there is created, on the one hand, a constantly extending market for gold and silver,
-unconnected with their functions as money, and, on the other hand, a latent source of supply, to
-which recourse is had principally in times of crisis and social disturbance.
-Hoarding serves various purposes in the economy of the metallic circulation. Its first function
-arises out of the conditions to which the currency of gold and silver coins is subject. We have
-seen how, along with the continual fluctuations in the extent and rapidity of the circulation of
-commodities and in their prices, the quantity of money current unceasingly ebbs and flows. This
-mass must, therefore, be capable of expansion and contraction. At one time money must be
-attracted in order to act as circulating coin, at another, circulating coin must be repelled in order
-to act again as more or less stagnant money. In order that the mass of money, actually current,
-may constantly saturate the absorbing power of the circulation, it is necessary that the quantity of
-gold and silver in a country be greater than the quantity required to function as coin. This
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-condition is fulfilled by money taking the form of hoards. These reserves serve as conduits for the
-supply or withdrawal of money to or from the circulation, which in this way never overflows its
-banks.46
-B. Means of Payment
-In the simple form of the circulation of commodities hitherto considered, we found a given value
-always presented to us in a double shape, as a commodity at one pole, as money at the opposite
-pole. The owners of commodities came therefore into contact as the respective representatives of
-what were already equivalents. But with the development of circulation, conditions arise under
-which the alienation of commodities becomes separated, by an interval of time, from the
-realisation of their prices. It will be sufficient to indicate the most simple of these conditions. One
-sort of article requires a longer, another a shorter time for its production. Again, the production of
-different commodities depends on different seasons of the year. One sort of commodity may be
-born on its own market place, another has to make a long journey to market. Commodity-owner
-No. 1, may therefore be ready to sell, before No. 2 is ready to buy. When the same transactions
-are continually repeated between the same persons, the conditions of sale are regulated in
-accordance with the conditions of production. On the other hand, the use of a given commodity,
-of a house, for instance, is sold (in common parlance, let) for a definite period. Here, it is only at
-the end of the term that the buyer has actually received the use-value of the commodity. He
-therefore buys it before he pays for it. The vendor sells an existing commodity, the purchaser
-buys as the mere representative of money, or rather of future money. The vendor becomes a
-creditor, the purchaser becomes a debtor. Since the metamorphosis of commodities, or the
-development of their value-form, appears here under a new aspect, money also acquires a fresh
-function; it becomes the means of payment.
-The character of creditor, or of debtor, results here from the simple circulation. The change in the
-form of that circulation stamps buyer and seller with this new die. At first, therefore, these new
-parts are just as transient and alternating as those of seller and buyer, and are in turns played by
-the same actors. But the opposition is not nearly so pleasant, and is far more capable of
-crystallisation.47 The same characters can, however, be assumed independently of the circulation
-of commodities. The class-struggles of the ancient world took the form chiefly of a contest
-between debtors and creditors, which in Rome ended in the ruin of the plebeian debtors. They
-were displaced by slaves. In the middle ages the contest ended with the ruin of the feudal debtors,
-who lost their political power together with the economic basis on which it was established.
-Nevertheless, the money relation of debtor and creditor that existed at these two periods reflected
-only the deeper-lying antagonism between the general economic conditions of existence of the
-classes in question.
-Let us return to the circulation of commodities. The appearance of the two equivalents,
-commodities and money, at the two poles of the process of sale, has ceased to be simultaneous.
-The money functions now, first as a measure of value in the determination of the price of the
-commodity sold; the price fixed by the contract measures the obligation of the debtor, or the sum
-of money that he has to pay at a fixed date. Secondly, it serves as an ideal means of purchase.
-Although existing only in the promise of the buyer to pay, it causes the commodity to change
-hands. It is not before the day fixed for payment that the means of payment actually steps into
-circulation, leaves the hand of the buyer for that of the seller. The circulating medium was
-transformed into a hoard, because the process stopped short after the first phase, because the
-converted shape of the commodity, viz., the money, was withdrawn from circulation. The means
-of payment enters the circulation, but only after the commodity has left it. The money is no
-longer the means that brings about the process. It only brings it to a close, by stepping in as the
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-absolute form of existence of exchange-value, or as the universal commodity. The seller turned
-his commodity into money, in order thereby to satisfy some want, the hoarder did the same in
-order to keep his commodity in its money-shape, and the debtor in order to be able to pay; if he
-do not pay, his goods will be sold by the sheriff. The value-form of commodities, money, is
-therefore now the end and aim of a sale, and that owing to a social necessity springing out of the
-process of circulation itself.
-The buyer converts money back into commodities before he has turned commodities into money:
-in other words, he achieves the second metamorphosis of commodities before the first. The
-seller’s commodity circulates, and realises its price, but only in the shape of a legal claim upon
-money. It is converted into a use-value before it has been converted into money. The completion
-of its first metamorphosis follows only at a later period.48
-The obligations falling due within a given period, represent the sum of the prices of the
-commodities, the sale of which gave rise to those obligations. The quantity of gold necessary to
-realise this sum, depends, in the first instance, on the rapidity of currency of the means of
-payment. That quantity is conditioned by two circumstances: first the relations between debtors
-and creditors form a sort of chain, in such a way that A, when he receives money from his debtor
-B, straightway hands it over to C his creditor, and so on; the second circumstance is the length of
-the intervals between the different due-days of the obligations. The continuous chain of
-payments, or retarded first metamorphoses, is essentially different from that interlacing of the
-series of metamorphoses which we considered on a former page. By the currency of the
-circulating medium, the connexion between buyers and sellers, is not merely expressed. This
-connexion is originated by, and exists in, the circulation alone. Contrariwise, the movement of the
-means of payment expresses a social relation that was in existence long before.
-The fact that a number of sales take place simultaneously, and side by side, limits the extent to
-which coin can be replaced by the rapidity of currency. On the other hand, this fact is a new lever
-in economising the means of payment. In proportion as payments are concentrated at one spot,
-special institutions and methods are developed for their liquidation. Such in the middle ages were
-the virements at Lyons. The debts due to A from B, to B from C, to C from A, and so on, have
-only to be confronted with each other, in order to annul each other to a certain extent like positive
-and negative quantities. There thus remains only a single balance to pay. The greater the amount
-of the payments concentrated, the less is this balance relatively to that amount, and the less is the
-mass of the means of payment in circulation.
-The function of money as the means of payment implies a contradiction without a terminus
-medius. In so far as the payments balance one another, money functions only ideally as money of
-account, as a measure of value. In so far as actual payments have to be made, money does not
-serve as a circulating medium, as a mere transient agent in the interchange of products, but as the
-individual incarnation of social labour, as the independent form of existence of exchange-value,
-as the universal commodity. This contradiction comes to a head in those phases of industrial and
-commercial crises which are known as monetary crises.49 Such a crisis occurs only where the
-ever-lengthening chain of payments, and an artificial system of settling them, has been fully
-developed. Whenever there is a general and extensive disturbance of this mechanism, no matter
-what its cause, money becomes suddenly and immediately transformed, from its merely ideal
-shape of money of account, into hard cash. Profane commodities can no longer replace it. The
-use-value of commodities becomes valueless, and their value vanishes in the presence of its own
-independent form. On the eve of the crisis, the bourgeois, with the self-sufficiency that springs
-from intoxicating prosperity, declares money to be a vain imagination. Commodities alone are
-money. But now the cry is everywhere: money alone is a commodity! As the hart pants after fresh
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-water, so pants his soul after money, the only wealth.50 In a crisis, the antithesis between
-commodities and their value-form, money, becomes heightened into an absolute contradiction.
-Hence, in such events, the form under which money appears is of no importance. The money
-famine continues, whether payments have to be made in gold or in credit money such as bank-
-notes.51
-If we now consider the sum total of the money current during a given period, we shall find that,
-given the rapidity of currency of the circulating medium and of the means of payment, it is equal
-to the sum of the prices to be realised, plus the sum of the payments falling due, minus the
-payments that balance each other, minus finally the number of circuits in which the same piece of
-coin serves in turn as means of circulation and of payment. Hence, even when prices, rapidity of
-currency, and the extent of the economy in payments, are given, the quantity of money current
-and the mass of commodities circulating during a given period, such as a day, no longer
-correspond. Money that represents commodities long withdrawn from circulation, continues to be
-current. Commodities circulate, whose equivalent in money will not appear on the scene till some
-future day. Moreover, the debts contracted each day, and the payments falling due on the same
-day, are quite incommensurable quantities.52
-Credit-money springs directly out of the function of money as a means of payment. Certificates of
-the debts owing for the purchased commodities circulate for the purpose of transferring those
-debts to others. On the other hand, to the same extent as the system of credit is extended, so is the
-function of money as a means of payment. In that character it takes various forms peculiar to
-itself under which it makes itself at home in the sphere of great commercial transactions. Gold
-and silver coin, on the other hand, are mostly relegated to the sphere of retail trade.53
-When the production of commodities has sufficiently extended itself, money begins to serve as
-the means of payment beyond the sphere of the circulation of commodities. It becomes the
-commodity that is the universal subject-matter of all contracts.54 Rents, taxes, and such like
-payments are transformed from payments in kind into money payments. To what extent this
-transformation depends upon the general conditions of production, is shown, to take one example,
-by the fact that the Roman Empire twice failed in its attempt to levy all contributions in money.
-The unspeakable misery of the French agricultural population under Louis XIV., a misery so
-eloquently denounced by Boisguillebert, Marshal Vauban, and others, was due not only to the
-weight of the taxes, but also to the conversion of taxes in kind into money taxes.55 In Asia, on the
-other hand, the fact that state taxes are chiefly composed of rents payable in kind, depends on
-conditions of production that are reproduced with the regularity of natural phenomena. And this
-mode of payment tends in its turn to maintain the ancient form of production. It is one of the
-secrets of the conservation of the Ottoman Empire. If the foreign trade, forced upon Japan by
-Europeans, should lead to the substitution of money rents for rents in kind, it will be all up with
-the exemplary agriculture of that country. The narrow economic conditions under which that
-agriculture is carried on, will be swept away.
-In every country, certain days of the year become by habit recognised settling days for various
-large and recurrent payments. These dates depend, apart from other revolutions in the wheel of
-reproduction, on conditions closely connected with the seasons. They also regulate the dates for
-payments that have no direct connexion with the circulation of commodities such as taxes, rents,
-and so on. The quantity of money requisite to make the payments, falling due on those dates all
-over the country, causes periodical, though merely superficial, perturbations in the economy of
-the medium of payment.56
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-From the law of the rapidity of currency of the means of payment, it follows that the quantity of
-the means of payment required for all periodical payments, whatever their source, is in inverse
-57proportion to the length of their periods.58
-The development of money into a medium of payment makes it necessary to accumulate money
-against the dates fixed for the payment of the sums owing. While hoarding, as a distinct mode of
-acquiring riches, vanishes with the progress of civil society, the formation of reserves of the
-means of payment grows with that progress.
-C. Universal Money
-When money leaves the home sphere of circulation, it strips off the local garbs which it there
-assumes, of a standard of prices, of coin, of tokens, and of a symbol of value, and returns to its
-original form of bullion. In the trade between the markets of the world, the value of commodities
-is expressed so as to be universally recognised. Hence their independent value-form also, in these
-cases, confronts them under the shape of universal money. It is only in the markets of the world
-that money acquires to the full extent the character of the commodity whose bodily form is also
-the immediate social incarnation of human labour in the abstract. Its real mode of existence in this
-sphere adequately corresponds to its ideal concept.
-Within the sphere of home circulation, there can be but one commodity which, by serving as a
-measure of value, becomes money. In the markets of the world a double measure of value holds
-sway, gold and silver.59
-Money of the world serves as the universal medium of payment, as the universal means of
-purchasing, and as the universally recognised embodiment of all wealth. Its function as a means
-of payment in the settling of international balances is its chief one. Hence the watchword of the
-mercantilists, balance of trade.60 Gold and silver serve as international means of purchasing
-chiefly and necessarily in those periods when the customary equilibrium in the interchange of
-products between different nations is suddenly disturbed. And lastly, it serves as the universally
-recognised embodiment of social wealth, whenever the question is not of buying or paying, but of
-transferring wealth from one country to another, and whenever this transference in the form of
-commodities is rendered impossible, either by special conjunctures in the markets or by the
-purpose itself that is intended.61
-Just as every country needs a reserve of money for its home circulation so, too, it requires one for
-external circulation in the markets of the world. The functions of hoards, therefore, arise in part
-out of the function of money, as the medium of the home circulation and home payments, and in
-part out of its function of money of the world.62 For this latter function, the genuine money-
-commodity, actual gold and silver, is necessary. On that account, Sir James Steuart, in order to
-distinguish them from their purely local substitutes, calls gold and silver “money of the world.”
-The current of the stream of gold and silver is a double one. On the one hand, it spreads itself
-from its sources over all the markets of the world, in order to become absorbed, to various
-extents, into the different national spheres of circulation, to fill the conduits of currency, to
-replace abraded gold and silver coins, to supply the material of articles of luxury, and to petrify
-into hoards.63 This first current is started by the countries that exchange their labour, realised in
-commodities, for the labour embodied in the precious metals by gold and silver-producing
-countries. On the other hand, there is a continual flowing backwards and forwards of gold and
-silver between the different national spheres of circulation, a current whose motion depends on
-the ceaseless fluctuations in the course of exchange.64
-Countries in which the bourgeois form of production is developed to a certain extent, limit the
-hoards concentrated in the strong rooms of the banks to the minimum required for the proper
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-performance of their peculiar functions.65 Whenever these hoards are strikingly above their
-average level, it is, with some exceptions, an indication of stagnation in the circulation of
-commodities, of an interruption in the even flow of their metamorphoses.66
-1 The question — Why does not money directly represent labour-time, so that a piece of paper may
-represent, for instance, x hours’ labour, is at bottom the same as the question why, given the
-production of commodities, must products take the form of commodities? This is evident, since their
-taking the form of commodities implies their differentiation into commodities and money. Or, why
-cannot private labour — labour for the account of private individuals — be treated as its opposite,
-immediate social labour? I have elsewhere examined thoroughly the Utopian idea of “labour-money”
-in a society founded on the production of commodities (l. c., p. 61, seq.). On this point I will only say
-further, that Owen’s “labour-money,” for instance, is no more “money” than a ticket for the theatre.
-Owen pre-supposes directly associated labour, a form of production that is entirely inconsistent with
-the production of commodities. The certificate of labour is merely evidence of the part taken by the
-individual in the common labour, and of his right to a certain portion of the common produce destined
-for consumption. But it never enters into Owen’s head to pre-suppose the production of commodities,
-and at the same time, by juggling with money, to try to evade the necessary conditions of that
-production.
-2 Savages and half-civilised races use the tongue differently. Captain Parry says of the inhabitants on
-the west coast of Baffin’s Bay: “In this case (he refers to barter) they licked it (the thing represented to
-them) twice to their tongues, after which they seemed to consider the bargain satisfactorily
-concluded.” In the same way, the Eastern Esquimaux licked the articles they received in exchange. If
-the tongue is thus used in the North as the organ of appropriation, no wonder that, in the South, the
-stomach serves as the organ of accumulated property, and that a Kaffir estimates the wealth of a man
-by the size of his belly. That the Kaffirs know what they are about is shown by the following: at the
-same time that the official British Health Report of 1864 disclosed the deficiency of fat-forming food
-among a large part of the working-class, a certain Dr. Harvey (not, however, the celebrated discoverer
-of the circulation of the blood), made a good thing by advertising recipes for reducing the superfluous
-fat of the bourgeoisie and aristocracy.
-3 See Karl Marx: “Zur Kritik, &c.” “Theorien von der Masseinheit des Geldes,” p. 53, seq.
-4 “Wherever gold and silver have by law been made to perform the function of money or of a measure
-of value side by side, it has always been tried, but in vain, to treat them as one and the same material.
-To assume that there is an invariable ratio between the quantities of gold and silver in which a given
-quantity of labour-time is incorporated, is to assume in fact, that gold and silver are of one and the
-same material, and that a given mass of the less valuable metal, silver, is a constant fraction of a given
-mass of gold. From the reign of Edward III. to the time of George II., the history of money in England
-consists of one long series of perturbations caused by the clashing of the legally fixed ratio between
-the values of gold and silver, with the fluctuations in their real values. At one time gold was too high,
-at another, silver. The metal that for the time being was estimated below its value, was withdrawn
-from circulation, mated and exported. The ratio between the two metals was then again altered by law,
-but the new nominal ratio soon came into conflict again with the real one. In our own times, the slight
-and transient fall in the value of gold compared with silver, which was a consequence of the Indo-
-Chinese demand for silver, produced on a far more extended scale in France the same phenomena,
-export of silver, and its expulsion from circulation by gold. During the years 1855, 1856 and 1857, the
-excess in France of gold-imports over gold-exports amounted to £41,580,000, while the excess of
-silver-exports over silver-imports was £14,704,000. In fact, in those countries in which both metals
-are legally measures of value, and therefore both legal tender, so that everyone has the option of
-paying in either metal, the metal that rises in value is at a premium, and, like every other commodity,
-92 Chapter 3
-measures its price in the over-estimated metal which alone serves in reality as the standard of value.
-The result of all experience and history with regard to this equation is simply that, where two
-commodities perform by law the functions of a measure of value, in practice one alone maintains that
-position.” (Karl Marx, l.c., pp. 52, 53.)
-5 The peculiar circumstance, that while the ounce of gold serves in England as the unit of the standard
-of money, the pound sterling does not form an aliquot part of it, has been explained as follows: “Our
-coinage was originally adapted to the employment of silver only, hence, an ounce of silver can always
-be divided into a certain adequate number of pieces of coin, but as gold was introduced at a later
-period into a coinage adapted only to silver, an ounce of gold cannot be coined into an aliquot number
-of pieces.” Maclaren, “A Sketch of the History of the Currency.” London, 1858, p. 16.
-6 With English writers the confusion between measure of value and standard of price (standard of
-value) is indescribable. Their functions, as well as their names, are constantly interchanged.
-7 Moreover, it has not general historical validity.
-8 It is thus that the pound sterling in English denotes less than one-third of its original weight; the
-pound Scot, before the union, only 1-36th; the French livre, 1-74th; the Spanish maravedi, less than 1-
-1,000th; and the Portuguese rei a still smaller fraction.
-9 “Le monete le quali oggi sono ideal, sono le piû antiche d’ogni nazione, e tutte furono un tempo real,
-e perche erano reali con esse si contava” [“The coins which today are ideal are the oldest coins of
-every nation, and all of them were once real, and precisely because they were real they were used for
-calculation”] (Galiani: Della moneta, l.c., p. 153.)
-10 David Urquhart remarks in his “Familiar Words” on the monstrosity (!) that now-a-days a pound
-(sterling), which is the unit of the English standard of money, is equal to about a quarter of an ounce
-of gold. “This is falsifying a measure, not establishing a standard.” He sees in this “false
-denomination” of the weight of gold, as in everything else, the falsifying hand of civilisation.
-11 When Anacharsis was asked for what purposes the Greeks used money, he replied, “For reckoning.”
-(Ashen. Deipn. 1. iv. 49 v. 2. ed. Schweighauser, 1802.)
-12 “Owing to the fact that money, when serving as the standard of price, appears under the same
-reckoning names as do the prices of commodities, and that therefore the sum of £3 17s. 10 1/2d. may
-signify on the one hand an ounce weight of gold, and on the other, the value of a ton of iron, this
-reckoning name of money has been called its mint-price. Hence there sprang up the extraordinary
-notion, that the value of gold is estimated in its own material, and that, in contradistinction to all other
-commodities, its price is fixed by the State. It was erroneously thought that the giving of reckoning
-names to definite weights of gold, is the same thing as fixing the value of those weights.” (Karl Marx,
-l.c., p. 52.)
-13 See “Theorien von der Masseinheit des Geldes” in “Zur Kritik der Pol Oekon. &c.,” p. 53, seq. The
-fantastic notions about raising or lowering the mint-price of money by transferring to greater or
-smaller weights of gold or silver, the names already legally appropriated to fixed weights of those
-metals; such notions, at least in those cases in which they aim, not at clumsy financial operations
-against creditors, both public and private but at economic quack remedies, have been so exhaustively
-treated by Wm. Petty in his “Quantulumcunque concerning money: To the Lord Marquis of Halifax,
-1682,” that even his immediate followers, Sir Dudley North and John Locke, not to mention later
-ones, could only dilute him. “If the wealth of a nation” he remarks, “could be decupled by a
-proclamation, it were strange that such proclamations have not long since been made by our
-Governors.” (l.c., p. 36.)
-14 “Ou bien, il faut consentir à dire qu’une valeur d’un million en argent vaut plus qu’une valeur égale
-en marchandises.” [“Or indeed it must be admitted that a million in money is worth more than an
-93 Chapter 3
-equal value in commodities”] (Le Trosne, l.c., p. 919), which amounts to saying “qu’une valeur vaut
-plus qu’une valeur égale.” [“that one value is worth more than another value which is equal to it.”]
-15 Jerome had to wrestle hard, not only in his youth with the bodily flesh, as is shown by his fight in
-the desert with the handsome women of his imagination, but also in his old age with the spiritual flesh.
-“I thought,” he says, “I was in the spirit before the Judge of the Universe.” “Who art thou?” asked a
-voice. “I am a Christian.” “Thou liest,” thundered back the great Judge, “thou art nought but a
-Ciceronian.”
-16
-“εχ σε του ... πυροσ τ’ανταμεειβεσθαι παντα, ϕησιν δ’Ηραχλειτοσ, χαι πυρ απαντων, ωο
-περ χρυσου χρηματα χαι χρηματων χρυσοσ.” [“As Heraclitus says, all things are exchanged
-for fire and fire for all things, as wares are exchanged for gold and gold for wares.”] (F. Lassalle:
-“Die Philosophie Herakleitos des Dunkeln.” Berlin, 1858, Vol. I, p. 222.) Lassalle in his note on
-this passage, p. 224, n. 3., erroneously makes gold a mere symbol of value.
-1\7 Note by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism in the Russian edition. — In his letter of November 28,
-1878, to N. F. Danielson (Nikolai-on) Marx proposed that this sentence be corrected to read as
-follows: “And, as a matter of fact, the value of each single yard is but the materialised form of a part
-of the social labour expended on the whole number of yards.” An analogous correction was made in a
-copy of the second German edition of the first volume of “Capital” belonging to Marx; however, not
-in his handwriting.
-18 “Toute vente est achat.” [“Every sale is a purchase.”] (Dr. Quesnay: “Dialogues sur le Commerce et
-les Travaux des Artisans.” Physiocrates ed. Daire I. Partie, Paris, 1846, p. 170), or as Quesnay in his
-“Maximes générales” puts it, “Vendre est acheter.” [“To sell is to buy.”]
-19 “Le prix d’une marchandise ne pouvant être payé que par le prix d’une autre marchandise”
-(Mercier de la Rivière: “L’Ordre naturel et essentiel des sociétés politiques.” [“The price of one
-commodity can only be paid by the price of another commodity”] Physiocrates, ed. Daire II.
-Partie, p. 554.)
-20 “Pour avoir cet argent, il faut avoir vendu,” [“In order to have this money, one must have made a
-sale,”] l.c., p. 543.
-21 As before remarked, the actual producer of gold or silver forms an exception. He exchanges his
-product directly for another commodity, without having first sold it.
-22 “Si l’argent représente, dans nos mains, les choses que nous pouvons désirer d’acheter, il y
-représente aussi les choses que nous avons vendues pour cet argent.” [“If money represents, in our
-hands, the things we can wish to buy, it also represents the things we have sold to obtain that money”]
-(Mercier de la Rivière, l.c., p. 586.)
-23 “Il y a donc ... quatre termes et trois contractants, dont l’un intervient deux fois” [“There are
-therefore ... four terms and three contracting parties, one of whom intervenes twice”] (Le Trosne, l.c.,
-p. 909.)
-24 Self-evident as this may be, it is nevertheless for the most part unobserved by political economists,
-and especially by the “Free-trader Vulgaris.”
-25 See my observations on James Mill in “Zur Kritik, &c.,” pp. 74-76. With regard to this subject, we
-may notice two methods characteristic of apologetic economy. The first is the identification of the
-circulation of commodities with the direct barter of products, by simple abstraction from their points
-of difference; the second is, the attempt to explain away the contradictions of capitalist production, by
-reducing the relations between the persons engaged in that mode of production, to the simple relations
-arising out of the circulation of commodities. The production and circulation of commodities are
-however, phenomena that occur to a greater or less extent in modes of production the most diverse. If
-94 Chapter 3
-we are acquainted with nothing but the abstract categories of circulation, which are common to all
-these modes of production, we cannot possibly know anything of the specific points of difference of
-those modes, nor pronounce any judgment upon them. In no science is such a big fuss made with
-commonplace truisms as in Political Economy. For instance, J. B. Say sets himself up as a judge of
-crises, because, forsooth, he knows that a commodity is a product.
-26 Translator’s note. — This word is here used in its original signification of the course or track
-pursued by money as it changes from hand to hand, a course which essentially differs from
-circulation.
-27 Even when the commodity is sold over and over again, a phenomenon that at present has no
-existence for us, it falls, when definitely sold for the last time, out of the sphere of circulation into that
-of consumption, where it serves either as means of subsistence or means of production.
-28 “Il (l’argent) n’a d’autre mouvement que celui qui lui est imprimé par les productions.” [“It”
-(money) “has no other motion than that imparted to it by the products”] (Le Trosne, l.c., p. 885.)
-29 “Ce sont les productions qui le (l’argent) mettent en mouvement et le font circuler ... La célérité de
-son mouvement (c. de l’argent) supplée à sa quantité. Lorsqu’il en est besoin il ne fait que glisser
-d’une main dans l’autre sans s’arrêter un instant.” [“It is products which set it” (money) “in motion
-and make it circulate ... The velocity of its” (money’s) “motion supplements its quantity. When
-necessary, it does nothing but slide from hand to hand, without stopping for a moment”] (Le Trosne,
-l.c.. pp. 915, 916.)
-30 “Money being ... the common measure of buying and selling, everybody who hath anything to sell,
-and cannot procure chapmen for it, is presently apt to think, that want of money in the kingdom, or
-country, is the cause why his goods do not go off; and so, want of money is the common cry; which is
-a great mistake... What do these people want, who cry out for money? ... The farmer complains ... he
-thinks that were more money in the country; he should have a price for his goods. Then it seems
-money is not his want, but a price for his corn and cattel, which he would sell, but cannot... Why
-cannot he get a price? ... (1) Either there is too much corn and cattel in the country, so that most who
-come to market have need of selling, as he hath, and few of buying; or (2) There wants the usual vent
-abroad by transportation..., or (3) The consumption fails, as when men, by reason of poverty, do not
-spend so much in their houses as formerly they did; wherefore it is not the increase of specific money,
-which would at all advance the farmer’s goods, but the removal of any of these three causes, which do
-truly keep down the market... The merchant and shopkeeper want money in the same manner, that is,
-they want a vent for the goods they deal in, by reason that the markets fail” ... [A nation] “never
-thrives better, than when riches are tost from hand to hand.” (Sir Dudley North: “Discourses upon
-Trade,” Lond. 1691, pp. 11-15, passim.) Herrenschwand’s fanciful notions amount merely to this, that
-the antagonism, which has its origin in the nature of commodities, and is reproduced in their
-circulation, can be removed by increasing the circulating medium. But if, on the one hand, it is a
-popular delusion to ascribe stagnation in production and circulation to insufficiency of the circulating
-medium, it by no means follows, on the other hand, that an actual paucity of the medium in
-consequence, e.g., of bungling legislative interference with the regulation of currency, may not give
-rise to such stagnation.
-31 “There is a certain measure and proportion of money requisite to drive the trade of a nation, more or
-less than which would prejudice the same. Just as there is a certain proportion of farthings necessary
-in a small retail trade, to change silver money, and to even such reckonings as cannot be adjusted with
-the smallest silver pieces.... Now, as the proportion of the number of farthings requisite in commerce
-is to be taken from the number of people, the frequency of their exchanges: as also, and principally,
-from the value of the smallest silver pieces of money; so in like manner, the proportion of money
-[gold and silver specie] requisite in our trade, is to be likewise taken from the frequency of
-commutations, and from the bigness of the payments.” (William Petty, “A Treatise of Taxes and
-95 Chapter 3
-Contributions.” Lond. 1667, p. 17.) The Theory of Hume was defended against the attacks of J.
-Steuart and others, by A. Young, in his “Political Arithmetic,” Lond. 1774, in which work there is a
-special chapter entitled “Prices depend on quantity of money, at p. 112, sqq. I have stated in “Zur
-Kritik, &c.,” p. 149: “He (Adam Smith) passes over without remark the question as to the quantity of
-coin in circulation, and treats money quite wrongly as a mere commodity.” This statement applies
-only in so far as Adam Smith, ex officio, treats of money. Now and then, however, as in his criticism
-of the earlier systems of Political Economy, he takes the right view. “The quantity of coin in every
-country is regulated by the value of the commodities which are to be circulated by it.... The value of
-the goods annually bought and sold in any country requires a certain quantity of money to circulate
-and distribute them to their proper consumers, and can give employment to no more. The channel of
-circulation necessarily draws to itself a sum sufficient to fill it, and never admits any more.” (“Wealth
-of Nations.” Bk. IV., ch. 1.) In like manner, ex officio, he opens his work with an apotheosis on the
-division of labour. Afterwards, in the last book which treats of the sources of public revenue, he
-occasionally repeats the denunciations of the division of labour made by his teacher, A. Ferguson.
-32 “The prices of things will certainly rise in every nation, as the gold and silver increase amongst the
-people, and consequently, where the gold and silver decrease in any nation, the prices of all things
-must fall proportionately to such decrease of money.” (Jacob Vanderlint: “Money Answers all
-Things.” Lond. 1734, p. 5.) A careful comparison of this book with Hume’s “Essays,” proves to my
-mind without doubt that Hume was acquainted with and made use of Vanderlint’s work, which is
-certainly an important one. The opinion that prices are determined by the quantity of the circulating
-medium, was also held by Barbon and other much earlier writers. “No inconvenience,” says
-Vanderlint, “can arise by an unrestrained trade, but very great advantage; since, if the cash of the
-nation be decreased by it, which prohibitions are designed to prevent, those nations that get the cash
-will certainly find everything advance in price, as the cash increases amongst them. And ... our
-manufactures, and everything else, will soon become so moderate as to turn the balance of trade in our
-favour, and thereby fetch the money back again.” (l.c.. pp. 43, 44.)
-33 That the price of each single kind of commodity forms a part of the sum of the prices of all the
-commodities in circulation, is a self-evident proposition. But how use-values which are
-incommensurable with regard to each other, are to be exchanged, en masse for the total sum of gold
-and silver in a country, is quite incomprehensible. If we start from the notion that all commodities
-together form one single commodity, of which each is but an aliquot part, we get the following
-beautiful result: The total commodity = x cwt. of gold; commodity A = an aliquot part of the total
-commodity = the same aliquot part of x cwt. of gold. This is stated in all seriousness by Montesquieu:
-“Si l’on compare la masse de l’or et de l’argent qui est dans le monde avec la somme des
-marchandises qui s’y vend il est certain que chaque denrée ou marchandise, en particulier, pourra être
-comparée à une certaine portion de la masse entière. Supposons qu’il n’y ait qu’une seule denrée ou
-marchandise dans le monde, ou qu’il n’y ait qu’une seule qui s’achète, et qu’elle se divise comme
-l’argent: Cette partie de cette marchandise répondra à une partie de la masse de l’argent; la moitié du
-total de l’une à la moitié du total de l’autre, &c.... L’établissement du prix des choses dépend toujours
-fondamentalement de la raison du total des choses au total des signes.” [“If one compares the amount
-of gold and silver in the world with the sum of the commodities available, it is certain that each
-product or commodity, taken in isolation, could be compared with a certain portion of the total amount
-of money. Let us suppose that there is only one product, or commodity, in the world, or only one that
-can be purchased, and that it can be divided in the same way as money: a certain part of this
-commodity would then correspond to a part of the total amount of money; half the total of the one
-would correspond to half the total of the other &c. ... the determination of the prices of things always
-depends, fundamentally, on the relation between the total amount of things and the total amount of
-their monetary symbols”] (Montesquieu, l.c. t. III, pp. 12, 13.) As to the further development of this
-theory by Ricardo and his disciples, James Mill, Lord Overstone, and others, see “Zur Kritik, &c.,”
-96 Chapter 3
-pp. 140-146, and p. 150, sqq. John Stuart Mill, with his usual eclectic logic, understands how to hold
-at the same time the view of his father, James Mill, and the opposite view. On a comparison of the text
-of his compendium, “Principles of Pol. Econ.,” with his preface to the first edition, in which preface
-he announces himself as the Adam Smith of his day — we do not know whether to admire more the
-simplicity of the man, or that of the public, who took him, in good faith, for the Adam Smith he
-announced himself to be, although he bears about as much resemblance to Adam Smith as say General
-Williams, of Kars, to the Duke of Wellington. The original researches of Mr. J. S. Mill which are
-neither extensive nor profound, in the domain of Political Economy, will be found mustered in rank
-and file in his little work, “Some Unsettled Questions of Political Economy,” which appeared in 1844.
-Locke asserts point blank the connexion between the absence of value in gold and silver, and the
-determination of their values by quantity alone. “Mankind having consented to put an imaginary value
-upon gold and silver ... the intrinsic value, regarded in these metals, is nothing but the quantity."
-(“Some Considerations,” &c., 1691, Works Ed. 1777, Vol. II., p. 15.)
-34 It lies of course, entirely beyond my purpose to take into consideration such details as the s
-eigniorage on minting. I will, however, cite for the benefit of the romantic sycophant, Adam Muller,
-who admires the “generous liberality” with which the English Government coins gratuitously, the
-following opinion of Sir Dudley North: “Silver and gold, like other commodities, have their ebbings
-and flowings. Upon the arrival of quantities from Spain ... it is carried into the Tower, and coined. Not
-long after there will come a demand for bullion to be exported again. If there is none, but all happens
-to be in coin, what then? Melt it down again; there’s no loss in it, for the coining costs the owner
-nothing. Thus the nation has been abused, and made to pay for the twisting of straw for asses to eat. If
-the merchant were made to pay the price of the coinage, he would not have sent his silver to the Tower
-without consideration, and coined money would always keep a value above uncoined silver.” (North,
-l.c., p. 18.) North was himself one of the foremost merchants in the reign of Charles II.
-35 “If silver never exceed what is wanted for the smaller payments it cannot be collected in sufficient
-quantities for the larger payments ... the use of gold in the main payments necessarily implies also its
-use in the retail trade: those who have gold coin offering them for small purchases, and receiving with
-the commodity purchased a balance of silver in return; by which means the surplus of silver that
-would otherwise encumber the retail dealer, is drawn off and dispersed into general circulation. But if
-there is as much silver as will transact the small payments independent of gold, the retail trader must
-then receive silver for small purchases; and it must of necessity accumulate in his hands.” (David
-Buchanan; “Inquiry into the Taxation and Commercial Policy of Great Britain.” Edinburgh, 1844, pp.
-248, 249.)
-36 The mandarin Wan-mao-in, the Chinese Chancellor of the Exchequer, took it into his head one day
-to lay before the Son of Heaven a proposal that secretly aimed at converting the assignats of the
-empire into convertible bank-notes. The assignats Committee, in its report of April, 1854, gives him a
-severe snubbing. Whether he also received the traditional drubbing with bamboos is not stated. The
-concluding part of the report is as follows: — “The Committee has carefully examined his proposal
-and finds that it is entirely in favour of the merchants, and that no advantage will result to the crown.”
-(“Arbeiten der Kaiserlich Russischen Gesandtschaft zu Peking über China.” Aus dem Russischen von
-Dr. K. Abel und F. A. Mecklenburg. Erster Band. Berlin, 1858, p. 47 sq.) In his evidence before the
-Committee of the House of Lords on the Bank Acts, a governor of the Bank of England says, with
-regard to the abrasion of gold coins during currency: “Every year a fresh class of sovereigns becomes
-too light. The class which one year passes with full weight, loses enough by wear and tear to draw the
-scales next year against it.” (House of Lords’ Committee, 1848, n. 429.)
-37 The following passage from Fullarton shows the want of clearness on the part of even the best
-writers on money, in their comprehension of its various functions: “That, as far as concerns our
-domestic exchanges, all the monetary functions which are usually performed by gold and silver coins,
-97 Chapter 3
-may be performed as effectually by a circulation of inconvertible notes paying no value but that
-factitious and conventional value they derive from the law is a fact which admits, I conceive, of no
-denial. Value of this description may be made to answer all the purposes of intrinsic value, and
-supersede even the necessity for a standard, provided only the quantity of issues be kept under due
-limitation.” (Fullerton: “Regulation of Currencies,” London, 1845, p. 21.) Because the commodity that
-serves as money is capable of being replaced in circulation by mere symbols of value, therefore its
-functions as a measure of value and a standard of prices are declared to be superfluous!
-38 From the fact that gold and silver, so far as they are coins, or exclusively serve as the medium of
-circulation, become mere tokens of themselves, Nicholas Barbon deduces the right of Governments
-“to raise money,” that is, to give to the weight of silver that is called a shilling the name of a greater
-weight, such as a crown; and so to pay creditors shillings, instead of crowns. “Money does wear and
-grow lighter by often telling over... It is the denomination and currency of the money that men regard
-in bargaining, and not the quantity of silver...’Tis the public authority upon the metal that makes it
-money.” (N. Barbon, l.c., pp. 29, 30, 25.)
-39 “Une richesse en argent n’est que ... richesse en productions, converties en argent.” [“Monetary
-wealth is nothing but ... wealth in products, transformed into money”] (Mercier de la Rivière, l.c.)
-“Une valeur en productions n’a fait que changer de forme.” [“A value in the form of products, which
-has merely changed its form.”] (Id., p. 486.)
-40 “’Tis by this practice’ they keep all their goods and manufactures at such low rates.” (Vanderlint,
-l.c., pp. 95, 96.)
-41 “Money ... is a pledge.” (John Bellers: “Essays about the Poor, Manufactures, Trade, Plantations,
-and Immorality,” Lond., 1699, p. 13.)
-42 A purchase, in a “categorical” sense, implies that gold and silver are already the converted form of
-commodities, or the product of a sale.
-43 Henry III., most Christian king of France, robbed cloisters of their relics, and turned them into
-money. It is well known what part the despoiling of the Delphic Temple, by the Phocians, played in
-the history of Greece. Temples with the ancients served as the dwellings of the gods of commodities.
-They were “sacred banks.” With the Phoenicians, a trading people par excellence, money was the
-transmuted shape of everything. It was, therefore, quite in order that the virgins, who, at the feast of
-the Goddess of Love, gave themselves up to strangers, should offer to the goddess the piece of money
-they received.
-4 3a “Gold, yellow, glittering, precious gold!
-Thus much of this, will make black white; foul, fair;
-Wrong, right; base, noble; old, young; coward, valiant.
-... What this, you gods? Why, this
-Will lug your priests and servants from your sides;
-Pluck stout men’s pillows from below their heads;
-This yellow slave
-Will knit and break religions; bless the accurs’d;
-Make the hoar leprosy ador’d; place thieves,
-And give them title, knee and approbation,
-With senators on the bench; this is it,
-That makes the wappen’d widow wed again:
-... Come damned earth,
-Though common whore of mankind.”
-(Shakespeare: Timon of Athens.)
-98 Chapter 3
-4 3b “Money! Nothing worse
-in our lives, so current, rampant, so corrupting.
-Money — you demolish cities, root men from their homes,
-you train and twist good minds and set them on
-to the most atrocious schemes. No limit,
-you make them adept at every kind of outrage,
-every godless crimes — money!”
-(Sophocles, Antigone.)
-44 “The desire of avarice to draw Pluto himself out of the bowels of the earth.” (The Deipnosophists,
-VI, 23, Athenaeus)
-45 “Accrescere quanto più si può il numero de’venditori d’ogni merce, diminuere quanto più si puo il
-numero dei compratori, questi sono i cardini sui quali si raggirano tutte le operazioni di economia
-politica.” [“These are the pivots around which all the measures of political economy turn: the
-maximum possible increase in the number of sellers of each commodity, and the maximum possible
-decrease in the number of buyers”] (Verri, l.c., p. 52.)
-46 “There is required for carrying on the trade of the nation a determinate sum of specifick money
-which varies, and is sometimes more, sometimes less, as the circumstances we are in require.... This
-ebbing and flowing of money supplies and accommodates itself, without any aid of Politicians.... The
-buckets work alternately; when money is scarce, bullion is coined; when bullion is scarce, money is
-melted.” (Sir D. North, l.c., Postscript, p. 3.) John Stuart Mill, who for a long time was an official of
-the East India Company, confirms the fact that in India silver ornaments still continue to perform
-directly the functions of a hoard. The silver ornaments are brought out and coined when there is a high
-rate of interest, and go back again when the rate of interest falls. (J. S. Mill’s Evidence “Reports on
-Bank Acts,” 1857, 2084.) According to a Parliamentary document of 1864 on the gold and silver
-import and export of India, the import of gold and silver in 1863 exceeded the export by £19,367,764.
-During the 8 years immediately preceding 1864, the excess of imports over exports of the precious
-metals amounted to £109,652,917. During this century far more than £200,000,000 has been coined in
-India.
-47 The following shows the debtor and creditor relations existing between English traders at the
-beginning of the 18th century. “Such a spirit of crudity reigns here in England among the men of
-trade, that is not to be met with in any other society of men, nor in any other kingdom of the world.”
-(“An Essay on Credit and the Bankrupt Act,” Lond., 1707, p. 2.)
-48 It will be seen from the following quotation from my book which appeared in 1859, why I take no
-notice in the text of an opposite form: “Contrariwise, in the process in M—C, the money can be
-alienated as a real means of purchase, and in that way, the price of the commodity can be realised
-before the use-value of the money is realised and the commodity actually delivered. This occurs
-constantly under the every-day form of prepayments. And it is under this form, that the English
-government purchases opium from the ryots of India.... In these cases, however, the money always
-acts as a means of purchase.... Of course capital also is advanced in the shape of money.... This point
-of view, however, does not fall within the horizon of simple circulation.” (“Zur Kritik, &c.,” pp. 119,
-120.)
-49 The monetary crisis referred to in the text, being a phase of every crisis, must be clearly
-distinguished from that particular form of crisis, which also is called a monetary crisis, but which may
-be produced by itself as an independent phenomenon in such a way as to react only indirectly on
-industry and commerce. The pivot of these crises is to be found in moneyed capital, and their sphere
-of direct action is therefore the sphere of that capital, viz., banking, the stock exchange, and finance.
-99 Chapter 3
-50 “The sudden reversion from a system of credit to a system of hard cash heaps theoretical fright on
-top of the practical panic; and the dealers by whose agency circulation is affected, shudder before the
-impenetrable mystery in which their own economic relations are involved” (Karl Marx, l.c., p. 126.)
-“The poor stand still, because the rich have no money to employ them, though they have the same
-land and hands to provide victuals and clothes, as ever they had; ...which is the true riches of a nation,
-and not the money.” John Bellers, Proposals for Raising a College of Industry, London, 1696, p3.
-51 he following shows how such times are exploited by the “amis du commerce.” “On one occasion
-(1839) an old grasping banker (in the city) in his private room raised the lid of the desk he sat over,
-and displayed to a friend rolls of bank-notes, saying with intense glee there were £600,000 of them,
-they were held to make money tight, and would all be let out after three o’clock on the same day.”
-(“The Theory of Exchanges. The Bank Charter Act of 1844.” Lond. 1864, p. 81). The Observer, a
-semi-official government organ, contained the following paragraph on 24th April, 1864: “Some very
-curious rumours are current of the means which have been resorted to in order to create a scarcity of
-banknotes.... Questionable as it would seem, to suppose that any trick of the kind would be adopted,
-the report has been so universal that it really deserves mention.”
-52 “The amount of purchases or contracts entered upon during the course of any given day, will not
-affect the quantity of money afloat on that particular day, but, in the vast majority of cases, will
-resolve themselves into multifarious drafts upon the quantity of money which may be afloat at
-subsequent dates more or less distant.... The bills granted or credits opened, to-day, need have no
-resemblance whatever, either in quantity, amount or duration, to those granted or entered upon to-
-morrow or next day, nay, many of today’s bills, and credits, when due, fall in with a mass of liabilities
-whose origins traverse a range of antecedent dates altogether indefinite, bills at 12, 6, 3 months or 1
-often aggregating together to swell the common liabilities of one particular day....” (“The Currency
-Theory Reviewed; in a Letter to the Scottish People.” By a Banker in England. Edinburgh, 1845, pp.
-29, 30 passim.)
-53 As an example of how little ready money is required in true commercial operations, I give below a
-statement by one of the largest London houses of its yearly receipts and payments. Its transactions
-during the year 1856, extending to many millions of pounds sterling, are here reduced to the scale of
-one million.
-Receipts.Payments.Bankers’ and Merchants’£533,596Bills payable after date£302,674Cheques on
-Bankers, &c. payable on demand357,715Cheques on London Bankers663,672Country
-Notes9,627Bank of England Notes22,743Bank of England Notes68,554Gold9,427Gold28,089Silver
-and Copper1,484Silver and Copper1,486 Post Office Orders933 Total £1,000,000Total
-£1,000,000“Report from the Select Committee on the Bank Acts, July, 1858,” p. lxxi..
-54 “The course of trade being thus turned, from exchanging of goods for goods, or delivering and
-taking, to selling and paying, all the bargains ... are now stated upon the foot of a Price in money.”
-(“An Essay upon Publick Credit.” 3rd Ed. Lond., 1710, p. 8.)
-55 “L’argent ... est devenu le bourreau de toutes choses.” Finance is the “alambic, qui a fait évaporer
-une quantité effroyable de biens et de denrées pour faire ce fatal précis.” “L’argent déclare la guerre à
-tout le genre humain.” [“Money ... has become the executioner of all things.” Finance is the “alembic
-that evaporates a frightful quantity of goods and commodities in order to obtain this fatal extract.”
-“Money [...] declares war [...] on the whole human race”] (Boisguillebert: “Dissertation sur la nature
-des richesses, de l’argent et des tributs.” Edit. Daire. Economistes financiers. Paris, 1843, t. i., pp. 413,
-419, 417.)
-56 “On Whitsuntide, 1824,” says Mr. Craig before the Commons’ Committee of 1826, “there was such
-an immense demand for notes upon the banks of Edinburgh, that by 11 o’clock they had not a note left
-100 Chapter 3
-in their custody. They sent round to all the different banks to borrow, but could not get them, and
-many of the transactions were adjusted by slips of paper only; yet by three o’clock the whole of the
-notes were returned into the banks from which they had issued! It was a mere transfer from hand to
-hand. “Although the average effective circulation of bank-notes in Scotland is less than three millions
-sterling, yet on certain pay days in the year, every single note in the possession of the bankers,
-amounting in the whole to about £7,000,000, is called into activity. On these occasions the notes have
-a single and specific function to perform, and so soon as they have performed it, they flow back into
-the various banks from which they issued. (See John Fullarton, “Regulation of Currencies.” Lond.
-1845, p. 86, note.) In explanation it should be stated, that in Scotland, at the date of Fullarton’s work,
-notes and not cheques were used to withdraw deposits.
-57 Note by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism in the Russian edition: Apparently a slip of the pen.
-When writing inverse the author evidently meant direct.
-58 To the question, “If there were occasion to raise 40 millions p. a., whether the same 6 millions
-(gold) ... would suffice for such revolutions and circulations thereof, as trade requires,” Petty replies in
-his usual masterly manner, “I answer yes: for the expense being 40 millions, if the revolutions were in
-such short circles, viz., weekly, as happens among poor artisans and labourers, who receive and pay
-every Saturday, then 40/52 parts of 1 million of money would answer these ends, but if the circles be
-quarterly, according to our custom of paying rent, and gathering taxes, then 10 millions were requisite.
-Wherefore, supposing payments in general to be of a mixed circle between one week and 13, then add
-10 millions to 40/52, the half of which will be 5½, so as if we have 5½ millions we have enough.”
-(William Petty: “Political Anatomy of Ireland.” 1672, Edit.: Lond. 1691, pp. 13, 14.)
-59 Hence the absurdity of every law prescribing that the banks of a country shall form reserves of that
-precious metal alone which circulates at home. The “pleasant difficulties” thus self-created by the
-Bank of England, are well known. On the subject of the great epochs in the history of the changes in
-the relative value of gold and silver, see Karl Marx, l.c., p. 136 sq. Sir Robert Peel, by his Bank Act of
-1844, sought to tide over the difficulty, by allowing the Bank of England to issue notes against silver
-bullion, on condition that the reserve of silver should never exceed more than one-fourth of the reserve
-of gold. The value of silver being for that purpose estimated at its price in the London market.
-Added in the 4th German edition. — [We find ourselves once more in a period of serious change in the
-relative values of gold and silver. About 25 years ago the ratio expressing the relative value of gold
-and silver was 15-1/2:1; now it is approximately 22:1, and silver is still constantly falling as against
-gold. This is essentially the result of a revolution in the mode of production of both metals. Formerly
-gold was obtained almost exclusively by washing it out from gold-bearing alluvial deposits, products
-of the weathering of auriferous rocks. Now this method has become inadequate and has been forced
-into the background by the processing of the quartz lodes themselves, a way of extraction which
-formerly was only of secondary importance, although well known to the ancients (Diodorus, III, 12-
-14) (Diodor’s v. Sicilien “Historische Bibliothek,” book III, 12-14. Stuttgart 1828, pp. 258-261).
-Moreover, not only were new huge silver deposits discovered in North America, in the Western part
-of the Rocky Mountains, but these and the Mexican silver mines were really opened up by the laying
-of railways, which made possible the shipment of modern machinery and fuel and in consequence the
-mining of silver on a very large scale at a low cost. However there is a great difference in the way the
-two metals occur in the quartz lodes. The gold is mostly native, but disseminated throughout the
-quartz in minute quantities. The whole mass of the vein must therefore be crushed and the gold either
-washed out or extracted by means of mercury. Often 1,000,000 grammes of quartz barely yield 1-3
-and very seldom 30-60 grammes of gold. Silver is seldom found native, however it occurs in special
-quartz that is separated from the lode with comparative ease and contains mostly 40-90% silver; or it
-is contained, in smaller quantities, in copper, lead and other ores which in themselves are worthwhile
-working. From this alone it is apparent that the labour expended on the production of gold is rather
-101 Chapter 3
-increasing while that expended on silver production has decidedly decreased, which quite naturally
-explains the drop in the value of the latter. This fall in value would express itself in a still greater fall
-in price if the price of silver were not pegged even to-day by artificial means. But America’s rich
-silver deposits have so far barely been tapped, and thus the prospects are that the value of this metal
-will keep on dropping for rather a long time to come. A still greater contributing factor here is the
-relative decrease in the requirement of silver for articles of general use and for luxuries, that is its
-replacement by plated goods, aluminium, etc. One may thus gauge the utopianism of the bimetallist
-idea that compulsory international quotation will raise silver again to the old value ratio of 1:15-1/2. It
-is more likely that silver will forfeit its money function more and more in the markets of the world. —
-F E.]
-60 The opponents, themselves, of the mercantile system, a system which considered the settlement of
-surplus trade balances in gold and silver as the aim of international trade, entirely misconceived the
-functions of money of the world. I have shown by the example of Ricardo in what way their false
-conception of the laws that regulate the quantity of the circulating medium, is reflected in their equally
-false conception of the international movement of the precious metals (l.c., pp. 150 sq.). His erroneous
-dogma: “An unfavourable balance of trade never arises but from a redundant currency.... The
-exportation of the coin is caused by its cheapness, and is not the effect, but the cause of an
-unfavourable balance,” already occurs in Barbon: “The Balance of Trade, if there be one, is not the
-cause of sending away the money out of a nation; but that proceeds from the difference of the value of
-bullion in every country.” (N. Barbon; l.c., pp. 59, 60.) MacCulloch in “The Literature of Political
-Economy, a classified catalogue, Lond. 1845,” praises Barbon for this anticipation, but prudently
-passes over the naïve forms, in which Barbon clothes the absurd supposition on which the “currency
-principle” is based. The absence of real criticism and even of honesty, in that catalogue culminates in
-the sections devoted to the history of the theory of money; the reason is that MacCulloch in this part of
-the work is flattering Lord Overstone whom he calls “facile princeps argentanorum.”
-61 For instance, in subsidies, money loans for carrying on wars or for enabling banks to resume cash
-payments, &c., it is the money-form, and no other, of value that may be wanted.
-62 “I would desire, indeed, no more convincing evidence of the competency of the machinery of the
-hoards in specie-paying countries to perform every necessary office of international adjustment,
-without any sensible aid from the general circulation, than the facility with which France, when but
-just recovering from the shock of a destructive foreign invasion, completed within the space of 27
-months the payment of her forced contribution of nearly 20 millions to the allied powers, and a
-considerable proportion of the sum in specie, without any perceptible contraction or derangement of
-her domestic currency, or even any alarming fluctuation of her exchanges.” (Fullerton, l.c., p. 141.)
-[Added in the 4th German edition. — We have a still more striking example in the facility with which
-the same France was able in 1871-73 to pay off within 30 months a forced contribution more than ten
-times as great, a considerable part of it likewise in specie. — F. E.]
-63 “L’argent se partage entre les nations relativement au besoin qu’elles en ont ... étant toujours attiré
-par les productions.” [“Money is shared among the nations in accordance with their need for it ... as it
-is always attracted by the products”] (Le Trosne, l.c., p. 916.) “The mines which are continually
-giving gold and silver, do give sufficient to supply such a needful balance to every nation.” (J.
-Vanderlint, l.c., p. 40.)
-64 “Exchanges rise and fall every week, and at some particular times in the year run high against a
-nation, and at other times run as high on the contrary.” (N. Barbon, l.c., p. 39)
-65 These various functions are liable to come into dangerous conflict with one another whenever gold
-and silver have also to serve as a fund for the conversion of bank-notes.
-102 Chapter 3
-66 “What money is more than of absolute necessity for a Home Trade, is dead stock ... and brings no
-profit to that country it’s kept in, but as it is transported in trade, as well as imported.” (John Bellers,
-“Essays,” p. 13.) “What if we have too much coin? We may melt down the heaviest and turn it into the
-splendour of plate, vessels or utensils of gold or silver, or send it out as a commodity, where the same
-is wanted or desired; or let it out at interest, where interest is high.” (W. Petty: “Quantulumcunque,” p.
-39.) “Money is but the fat of the Body Politick, whereof too much doth as often hinder its agility, as
-too little makes it sick ... as fat lubricates the motion of the muscles, feeds in want of victuals, fills up
-the uneven cavities, and beautifies the body; so doth money in the state quicken its action, feeds from
-abroad in time of dearth at home, evens accounts ... and beautifies the whole; altho more especially the
-particular persons that have it in plenty.” (W. Petty, “Political Anatomy of Ireland,” p. 14.)
-Part 2: Transformation of Money
-into Capital
-104 Chapter 4
-Chapter 4: The General Formula for Capital
-The circulation of commodities is the starting-point of capital. The production of commodities,
-their circulation, and that more developed form of their circulation called commerce, these form
-the historical ground-work from which it rises. The modern history of capital dates from the
-creation in the 16th century of a world-embracing commerce and a world-embracing market.
-If we abstract from the material substance of the circulation of commodities, that is, from the
-exchange of the various use-values, and consider only the economic forms produced by this
-process of circulation, we find its final result to be money: this final product of the circulation of
-commodities is the first form in which capital appears.
-As a matter of history, capital, as opposed to landed property, invariably takes the form at first of
-money; it appears as moneyed wealth, as the capital of the merchant and of the usurer.1 But we
-have no need to refer to the origin of capital in order to discover that the first form of appearance
-of capital is money. We can see it daily under our very eyes. All new capital, to commence with,
-comes on the stage, that is, on the market, whether of commodities, labour, or money, even in our
-days, in the shape of money that by a definite process has to be transformed into capital.
-The first distinction we notice between money that is money only, and money that is capital, is
-nothing more than a difference in their form of circulation.
-The simplest form of the circulation of commodities is C—M—C, the transformation of
-commodities into money, and the change of the money back again into commodities; or selling in
-order to buy. But alongside of this form we find another specifically different form: M—C—M,
-the transformation of money into commodities, and the change of commodities back again into
-money; or buying in order to sell. Money that circulates in the latter manner is thereby
-transformed into, becomes capital, and is already potentially capital.
-Now let us examine the circuit M—C—M a little closer. It consists, like the other, of two
-antithetical phases. In the first phase, M—C, or the purchase, the money is changed into a
-commodity. In the second phase, C—M, or the sale, the commodity is changed back again into
-money. The combination of these two phases constitutes the single movement whereby money is
-exchanged for a commodity, and the same commodity is again exchanged for money; whereby a
-commodity is bought in order to be sold, or, neglecting the distinction in form between buying
-and selling, whereby a commodity is bought with money, and then money is bought with a
-commodity. 2 The result, in which the phases of the process vanish, is the exchange of money for
-money, M—M. If I purchase 2,000 lbs. of cotton for £100, and resell the 2,000 lbs. of cotton for
-£110, I have, in fact, exchanged £100 for £110, money for money.
-Now it is evident that the circuit M—C—M would be absurd and without meaning if the intention
-were to exchange by this means two equal sums of money, £100 for £100. The miser’s plan
-would be far simpler and surer; he sticks to his £100 instead of exposing it to the dangers of
-circulation. And yet, whether the merchant who has paid £100 for his cotton sells it for £110, or
-lets it go for £100, or even £50, his money has, at all events, gone through a characteristic and
-original movement, quite different in kind from that which it goes through in the hands of the
-peasant who sells corn, and with the money thus set free buys clothes. We have therefore to
-examine first the distinguishing characteristics of the forms of the circuits M—C—M and C—
-M—C, and in doing this the real difference that underlies the mere difference of form will reveal
-itself.
-Let us see, in the first place, what the two forms have in common.
-105 Chapter 4
-Both circuits are resolvable into the same two antithetical phases, C—M, a sale, and M—C, a
-purchase. In each of these phases the same material elements ‒ a commodity, and money, and the
-same economic dramatis personæ, a buyer and a seller ‒ confront one another. Each circuit is the
-unity of the same two antithetical phases, and in each case this unity is brought about by the
-intervention of three contracting parties, of whom one only sells, another only buys, while the
-third both buys and sells.
-What, however, first and foremost distinguishes the circuit C—M—C from the circuit M—C—
-M, is the inverted order of succession of the two phases. The simple circulation of commodities
-begins with a sale and ends with a purchase, while the circulation of money as capital begins with
-a purchase and ends with a sale. In the one case both the starting-point and the goal are
-commodities, in the other they are money. In the first form the movement is brought about by the
-intervention of money, in the second by that of a commodity.
-In the circulation C—M—C, the money is in the end converted into a commodity, that serves as a
-use-value; it is spent once for all. In the inverted form, M—C—M, on the contrary, the buyer lays
-out money in order that, as a seller, he may recover money. By the purchase of his commodity he
-throws money into circulation, in order to withdraw it again by the sale of the same commodity.
-He lets the money go, but only with the sly intention of getting it back again. The money,
-therefore, is not spent, it is merely advanced. 3
-In the circuit C—M—C, the same piece of money changes its place twice. The seller gets it from
-the buyer and pays it away to another seller. The complete circulation, which begins with the
-receipt, concludes with the payment, of money for commodities. It is the very contrary in the
-circuit M—C—M. Here it is not the piece of money that changes its place twice, but the
-commodity. The buyer takes it from the hands of the seller and passes it into the hands of another
-buyer. Just as in the simple circulation of commodities the double change of place of the same
-piece of money effects its passage from one hand into another, so here the double change of place
-of the same commodity brings about the reflux of the money to its point of departure.
-Such reflux is not dependent on the commodity being sold for more than was paid for it. This
-circumstance influences only the amount of the money that comes back. The reflux itself takes
-place, so soon as the purchased commodity is resold, in other words, so soon as the circuit M—
-C—M is completed. We have here, therefore, a palpable difference between the circulation of
-money as capital, and its circulation as mere money.
-The circuit C—M—C comes completely to an end, so soon as the money brought in by the sale
-of one commodity is abstracted again by the purchase of another.
-If, nevertheless, there follows a reflux of money to its starting-point, this can only happen through
-a renewal or repetition of the operation. If I sell a quarter of corn for £3, and with this £3 buy
-clothes, the money, so far as I am concerned, is spent and done with. It belongs to the clothes
-merchant. If I now sell a second quarter of corn, money indeed flows back to me, not however as
-a sequel to the first transaction, but in consequence of its repetition. The money again leaves me,
-so soon as I complete this second transaction by a fresh purchase. Therefore, in the circuit C—
-M—C, the expenditure of money has nothing to do with its reflux. On the other hand, in M—C—
-M, the reflux of the money is conditioned by the very mode of its expenditure. Without this
-reflux, the operation fails, or the process is interrupted and incomplete, owing to the absence of
-its complementary and final phase, the sale.
-The circuit C—M—C starts with one commodity, and finishes with another, which falls out of
-circulation and into consumption. Consumption, the satisfaction of wants, in one word, use-value,
-106 Chapter 4
-is its end and aim. The circuit M—C—M, on the contrary, commences with money and ends with
-money. Its leading motive, and the goal that attracts it, is therefore mere exchange-value.
-In the simple circulation of commodities, the two extremes of the circuit have the same economic
-form. They are both commodities, and commodities of equal value. But they are also use-values
-differing in their qualities, as, for example, corn and clothes. The exchange of products, of the
-different materials in which the labour of society is embodied, forms here the basis of the
-movement. It is otherwise in the circulation M—C—M, which at first sight appears purposeless,
-because tautological. Both extremes have the same economic form. They are both money, and
-therefore are not qualitatively different use-values; for money is but the converted form of
-commodities, in which their particular use-values vanish. To exchange £100 for cotton, and then
-this same cotton again for £100, is merely a roundabout way of exchanging money for money, the
-same for the same, and appears to be an operation just as purposeless as it is absurd. 4 One sum of
-money is distinguishable from another only by its amount. The character and tendency of the
-process M—C—M, is therefore not due to any qualitative difference between its extremes, both
-being money, but solely to their quantitative difference. More money is withdrawn from
-circulation at the finish than was thrown into it at the start. The cotton that was bought for £100 is
-perhaps resold for £100 + £10 or £110. The exact form of this process is therefore M—C—M',
-where M' = M + ∆ M = the original sum advanced, plus an increment. This increment or excess
-over the original value I call “surplus-value.” The value originally advanced, therefore, not only
-remains intact while in circulation, but adds to itself a surplus-value or expands itself. It is this
-movement that converts it into capital.
-Of course, it is also possible, that in C—M—C, the two extremes C-C, say corn and clothes, may
-represent different quantities of value. The farmer may sell his corn above its value, or may buy
-the clothes at less than their value. He may, on the other hand, “be done” by the clothes merchant.
-Yet, in the form of circulation now under consideration, such differences in value are purely
-accidental. The fact that the corn and the clothes are equivalents, does not deprive the process of
-all meaning, as it does in M—C—M. The equivalence of their values is rather a necessary
-condition to its normal course.
-The repetition or renewal of the act of selling in order to buy, is kept within bounds by the very
-object it aims at, namely, consumption or the satisfaction of definite wants, an aim that lies
-altogether outside the sphere of circulation. But when we buy in order to sell, we, on the contrary,
-begin and end with the same thing, money, exchange-value; and thereby the movement becomes
-interminable. No doubt, M becomes M + ∆M, £100 become £110. But when viewed in their
-qualitative aspect alone, £110 are the same as £100, namely money; and considered
-quantitatively, £110 is, like £100, a sum of definite and limited value. If now, the £110 be spent
-as money, they cease to play their part. They are no longer capital. Withdrawn from circulation,
-they become petrified into a hoard, and though they remained in that state till doomsday, not a
-single farthing would accrue to them. If, then, the expansion of value is once aimed at, there is
-just the same inducement to augment the value of the £110 as that of the £100; for both are but
-limited expressions for exchange-value, and therefore both have the same vocation to approach,
-by quantitative increase, as near as possible to absolute wealth. Momentarily, indeed, the value
-originally advanced, the £100 is distinguishable from the surplus-value of £10 that is annexed to
-it during circulation; but the distinction vanishes immediately. At the end of the process, we do
-not receive with one hand the original £100, and with the other, the surplus-value of £10. We
-simply get a value of £110, which is in exactly the same condition and fitness for commencing
-the expanding process, as the original £100 was. Money ends the movement only to begin it
-again.5 Therefore, the final result of every separate circuit, in which a purchase and consequent
-107 Chapter 4
-sale are completed, forms of itself the starting-point of a new circuit. The simple circulation of
-commodities ‒ selling in order to buy ‒ is a means of carrying out a purpose unconnected with
-circulation, namely, the appropriation of use-values, the satisfaction of wants. The circulation of
-money as capital is, on the contrary, an end in itself, for the expansion of value takes place only
-within this constantly renewed movement. The circulation of capital has therefore no limits.6
-As the conscious representative of this movement, the possessor of money becomes a capitalist.
-His person, or rather his pocket, is the point from which the money starts and to which it returns.
-The expansion of value, which is the objective basis or main-spring of the circulation M—C—M,
-becomes his subjective aim, and it is only in so far as the appropriation of ever more and more
-wealth in the abstract becomes the sole motive of his operations, that he functions as a capitalist,
-that is, as capital personified and endowed with consciousness and a will. Use-values must
-therefore never be looked upon as the real aim of the capitalist; 7 neither must the profit on any
-single transaction. The restless never-ending process of profit-making alone is what he aims at.8
-This boundless greed after riches, this passionate chase after exchange-value9, is common to the
-capitalist and the miser; but while the miser is merely a capitalist gone mad, the capitalist is a
-rational miser. The never-ending augmentation of exchange-value, which the miser strives after,
-by seeking to save10 his money from circulation, is attained by the more acute capitalist, by
-constantly throwing it afresh into circulation.11
-The independent form, i.e., the money-form, which the value of commodities assumes in the case
-of simple circulation, serves only one purpose, namely, their exchange, and vanishes in the final
-result of the movement. On the other hand, in the circulation M—C—M, both the money and the
-commodity represent only different modes of existence of value itself, the money its general
-mode, and the commodity its particular, or, so to say, disguised mode.12 It is constantly changing
-from one form to the other without thereby becoming lost, and thus assumes an automatically
-active character. If now we take in turn each of the two different forms which self-expanding
-value successively assumes in the course of its life, we then arrive at these two propositions:
-Capital is money: Capital is commodities.13 In truth, however, value is here the active factor in a
-process, in which, while constantly assuming the form in turn of money and commodities, it at
-the same time changes in magnitude, differentiates itself by throwing off surplus-value from
-itself; the original value, in other words, expands spontaneously. For the movement, in the course
-of which it adds surplus-value, is its own movement, its expansion, therefore, is automatic
-expansion. Because it is value, it has acquired the occult quality of being able to add value to
-itself. It brings forth living offspring, or, at the least, lays golden eggs.
-Value, therefore, being the active factor in such a process, and assuming at one time the form of
-money, at another that of commodities, but through all these changes preserving itself and
-expanding, it requires some independent form, by means of which its identity may at any time be
-established. And this form it possesses only in the shape of money. It is under the form of money
-that value begins and ends, and begins again, every act of its own spontaneous generation. It
-began by being £100, it is now £110, and so on. But the money itself is only one of the two forms
-of value. Unless it takes the form of some commodity, it does not become capital. There is here
-no antagonism, as in the case of hoarding, between the money and commodities. The capitalist
-knows that all commodities, however scurvy they may look, or however badly they may smell,
-are in faith and in truth money, inwardly circumcised Jews, and what is more, a wonderful means
-whereby out of money to make more money.
-In simple circulation, C—M—C, the value of commodities attained at the most a form
-independent of their use-values, i.e., the form of money; but that same value now in the
-circulation M—C—M, or the circulation of capital, suddenly presents itself as an independent
-108 Chapter 4
-substance, endowed with a motion of its own, passing through a life-process of its own, in which
-money and commodities are mere forms which it assumes and casts off in turn. Nay, more:
-instead of simply representing the relations of commodities, it enters now, so to say, into private
-relations with itself. It differentiates itself as original value from itself as surplus-value; as the
-father differentiates himself from himself quâ the son, yet both are one and of one age: for only
-by the surplus-value of £10 does the £100 originally advanced become capital, and so soon as this
-takes place, so soon as the son, and by the son, the father, is begotten, so soon does their
-difference vanish, and they again become one, £110.
-Value therefore now becomes value in process, money in process, and, as such, capital. It comes
-out of circulation, enters into it again, preserves and multiplies itself within its circuit, comes back
-out of it with expanded bulk, and begins the same round ever afresh.14 M—M', money which
-begets money, such is the description of Capital from the mouths of its first interpreters, the
-Mercantilists.
-Buying in order to sell, or, more accurately, buying in order to sell dearer, M—C—M', appears
-certainly to be a form peculiar to one kind of capital alone, namely, merchants’ capital. But
-industrial capital too is money, that is changed into commodities, and by the sale of these
-commodities, is re-converted into more money. The events that take place outside the sphere of
-circulation, in the interval between the buying and selling, do not affect the form of this
-movement. Lastly, in the case of interest-bearing capital, the circulation M—C—M' appears
-abridged. We have its result without the intermediate stage, in the form M—M', “en style
-lapidaire” so to say, money that is worth more money, value that is greater than itself.
-M—C—M' is therefore in reality the general formula of capital as it appears prima facie within
-the sphere of circulation.
-1 The contrast between the power, based on the personal relations of dominion and servitude, that is
-conferred by landed property, and the impersonal power that is given by money, is well expressed by
-the two French proverbs, “Nulle terre sans seigneur,” and “L’argent n’a pas de maître,” [“No land
-without its lord,” and “Money has no master.”]
-2 “Avec de l’argent on achète des marchandises et avec des marchandises on achète de l’argent.”
-[“With money one buys commodities, and with commodities one buys money”] (Mercier de la
-Rivière: “L’ordre naturel et essentiel des sociétés politiques,” p. 543.)
-3 “When a thing is bought in order to be sold again, the sum employed is called money advanced;
-when it is bought not to be sold, it may be said to be expended.” — (James Steuart: “Works,” &c.
-Edited by Gen. Sir James Steuart, his son. Lond., 1805, V. I., p. 274.)
-4 “On n’échange pas de l’argent contre de l’argent,” [“One does not exchange money for money,”]
-says Mercier de la Rivière to the Mercantilists (l.c., p. 486.) In a work, which, ex professo treats of
-“trade” and “speculation,” occurs the following: “All trade consists in the exchange of things of
-different kinds; and the advantage” (to the merchant?) “arises out of this difference. To exchange a
-pound of bread against a pound of bread ... would be attended with no advantage; ... Hence trade is
-advantageously contrasted with gambling, which consists in a mere exchange of money for money.”
-(Th. Corbet, “An Inquiry into the Causes and Modes of the Wealth of Individuals; or the Principles of
-Trade and Speculation Explained.” London, 1841, p. 5.) Although Corbet does not see that M—M, the
-exchange of money for money, is the characteristic form of circulation, not only of merchants’ capital
-but of all capital, yet at least he acknowledges that this form is common to gambling and to one
-species of trade, viz., speculation: but then comes MacCulloch and makes out, that to buy in order to
-sell, is to speculate, and thus the difference between Speculation and Trade vanishes. “Every
-transaction in which an individual buys produce in order to sell it again, is, in fact, a speculation.”
-109 Chapter 4
-(MacCulloch: “A Dictionary Practical, &c., of Commerce.” Lond., 1847, p. 1009.) With much more
-naïveté, Pinto, the Pindar of the Amsterdam Stock Exchange, remarks, “Le commerce est un jeu:
-(taken from Locke) et ce n’est pas avec des gueux qu’on peut gagner. Si l’on gagnait longtemps en
-tout avec tous, il faudrait rendre de bon accord les plus grandes parties du profit pour recommencer le
-jeu.” [“Trade is a game, and nothing can be won from beggars. If one won everything from everybody
-all the time, it would be necessary to give back the greater part of the profit voluntarily, in order to
-begin the game again”] (Pinto: “Traité de la Circulation et du Crédit.” Amsterdam, 1771. p. 231,)
-5 “Capital is divisible ... into the original capital and the profit, the increment to the capital ... although
-in practice this profit is immediately turned into capital, and set in motion with the original.” (F.
-Engels, “Umrisse zu einer Kritik der Nationalökonomie, in: Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher,
-herausgegeben von Arnold Ruge und Karl Marx.” Paris, 1844, p. 99.)
-6 Aristotle opposes Œconomic to Chrematistic. He starts from the former. So far as it is the art of
-gaining a livelihood, it is limited to procuring those articles that are necessary to existence, and
-useful either to a household or the state. “True wealth (ὁ ἀληθινὸς πλοῦτος) consists of such
-values in use; for the quantity of possessions of this kind, capable of making life pleasant, is not
-unlimited. There is, however, a second mode of acquiring things, to which we may by preference
-and with correctness give the name of Chrematistic, and in this case there appear to be no limits
-to riches and possessions. Trade (ἡ καπηλικὴ is literally retail trade, and Aristotle takes this kind
-because in it values in use predominate) does not in its nature belong to Chrematistic, for here the
-exchange has reference only to what is necessary to themselves (the buyer or seller).” Therefore,
-as he goes on to show, the original form of trade was barter, but with the extension of the latter,
-there arose the necessity for money. On the discovery of money, barter of necessity developed
-into καπηλικὴ, into trading in commodities, and this again, in opposition to its original tendency,
-grew into Chrematistic, into the art of making money. Now Chrematistic is distinguishable from
-Œconomic in this way, that “in the case of Chrematistic circulation is the source of riches
-(ποιητικὴ χρημάτων ... διὰ χρημάτων μεταβολῆς). And it appears to revolve about money, for
-money is the beginning and end of this kind of exchange (τὸ γὰρ νόμισμα στοιχεῖον καὶ πέρας τῆς
-ἀλλαγῆς ἐστίν). Therefore also riches, such as Chrematistic strives for, are unlimited. Just as
-every art that is not a means to an end, but an end in itself, has no limit to its aims, because it
-seeks constantly to approach nearer and nearer to that end, while those arts that pursue means to
-an end, are not boundless, since the goal itself imposes a limit upon them, so with Chrematistic,
-there are no bounds to its aims, these aims being absolute wealth. Œconomic not Chrematistic has
-a limit ... the object of the former is something different from money, of the latter the
-augmentation of money.... By confounding these two forms, which overlap each other, some
-people have been led to look upon the preservation and increase of money ad infinitum as the end
-and aim of Œconomic.” (Aristoteles, De Rep. edit. Bekker, lib. I., c. 8, 9. passim.)
-7 “Commodities (here used in the sense of use-values) are not the terminating object of the trading
-capitalist, money is his terminating object.” (Th. Chalmers, On Pol. Econ. &c., 2nd Ed., Glasgow,
-1832, pp. 165, 166.)
-8 “Il mercante non conta quasi per niente il lucro fatto, ma mira sempre al futuro.” [“The merchant
-counts the money he has made as almost nothing; he always looks to the future.”] (A. Genovesi,
-Lezioni di Economia Civile (1765), Custodi’s edit. of Italian Economists. Parte Moderna t. viii, p.
-139.)
-9 “The inextinguishable passion for gain, the auri sacra fames, will always lead capitalists.”
-(MacCulloch: “The Principles of Polit. Econ.” London, 1830, p. 179.) This view, of course, does not
-prevent the same MacCulloch and others of his kidney, when in theoretical difficulties, such, for
-example, as the question of over-production, from transforming the same capitalist into a moral
-110 Chapter 4
-citizen, whose sole concern is for use-values, and who even develops an insatiable hunger for boots,
-hats, eggs, calico, and other extremely familiar sorts of use-values.
-10 Σὠξειν is a characteristic Greek expression for hoarding. So in English to save has the same
-two meanings: sauver and épargner.
-11 “Questo infinito che le cose non hanno in progresso, hanno in giro.” [“That infinity which things do
-not possess, they possess in circulation.”] (Galiani.)
-12 “Ce n’est pas la matière qui fait le capital, mais la valeur de ces matières.” [“It is not matter which
-makes capital, but the value of that matter.”] (J. B. Say: “Traité d’Econ. Polit.” 3ème éd. Paris, 1817,
-t. II., p. 429.)
-13 “Currency (!) employed in producing articles... is capital.” (Macleod: “The Theory and Practice of
-Banking.” London, 1855, v. 1, ch. i, p. 55.) “Capital is commodities.” (James Mill: “Elements of Pol.
-Econ.” Lond., 1821, p. 74.)
-14 Capital: “portion fructifiante de la richesse accumulée... valeur permanente, multipliante.”
-[productive portion of accumulated wealth ... permanent, multiplying value.] (Sismondi: “Nouveaux
-Principes d’Econ. Polit.,” t. i., p. 88, 89.)
-Chapter 5: Contradictions in the General
-Formula of Capital
-The form which circulation takes when money becomes capital, is opposed to all the laws we
-have hitherto investigated bearing on the nature of commodities, value and money, and even of
-circulation itself. What distinguishes this form from that of the simple circulation of commodities,
-is the inverted order of succession of the two antithetical processes, sale and purchase. How can
-this purely formal distinction between these processes change their character as it were by magic?
-But that is not all. This inversion has no existence for two out of the three persons who transact
-business together. As capitalist, I buy commodities from A and sell them again to B, but as a
-simple owner of commodities, I sell them to B and then purchase fresh ones from A. A and B see
-no difference between the two sets of transactions. They are merely buyers or sellers. And I on
-each occasion meet them as a mere owner of either money or commodities, as a buyer or a seller,
-and, what is more, in both sets of transactions, I am opposed to A only as a buyer and to B only as
-a seller, to the one only as money, to the other only as commodities, and to neither of them as
-capital or a capitalist, or as representative of anything that is more than money or commodities, or
-that can produce any effect beyond what money and commodities can. For me the purchase from
-A and the sale to B are part of a series. But the connexion between the two acts exists for me
-alone. A does not trouble himself about my transaction with B, nor does B about my business
-with A. And if I offered to explain to them the meritorious nature of my action in inverting the
-order of succession, they would probably point out to me that I was mistaken as to that order of
-succession, and that the whole transaction, instead of beginning with a purchase and ending with
-a sale, began, on the contrary, with a sale and was concluded with a purchase. In truth, my first
-act, the purchase, was from the standpoint of A, a sale, and my second act, the sale, was from the
-standpoint of B, a purchase. Not content with that, A and B would declare that the whole series
-was superfluous and nothing but Hokus Pokus; that for the future A would buy direct from B, and
-B sell direct to A. Thus the whole transaction would be reduced to a single act forming an
-isolated, non-complemented phase in the ordinary circulation of commodities, a mere sale from
-A’s point of view, and from B’s, a mere purchase. The inversion, therefore, of the order of
-succession, does not take us outside the sphere of the simple circulation of commodities, and we
-must rather look, whether there is in this simple circulation anything permitting an expansion of
-the value that enters into circulation, and, consequently, a creation of surplus-value.
-Let us take the process of circulation in a form under which it presents itself as a simple and
-direct exchange of commodities. This is always the case when two owners of commodities buy
-from each other, and on the settling day the amounts mutually owing are equal and cancel each
-other. The money in this case is money of account and serves to express the value of the
-commodities by their prices, but is not, itself, in the shape of hard cash, confronted with them. So
-far as regards use-values, it is clear that both parties may gain some advantage. Both part with
-goods that, as use-values, are of no service to them, and receive others that they can make use of.
-And there may also be a further gain. A, who sells wine and buys corn, possibly produces more
-wine, with given labour-time, than farmer B could, and B on the other hand, more corn than
-wine-grower A could. A, therefore, may get, for the same exchange-value, more corn, and B
-more wine, than each would respectively get without any exchange by producing his own corn
-and wine. With reference, therefore, to use-value, there is good ground for saying that “exchange
-is a transaction by which both sides gain.”1 It is otherwise with exchange-value. “A man who has
-112 Chapter 5
-plenty of wine and no corn treats with a man who has plenty of corn and no wine; an exchange
-takes place between them of corn to the value of 50, for wine of the same value. This act
-produces no increase of exchange-value either for the one or the other; for each of them already
-possessed, before the exchange, a value equal to that which he acquired by means of that
-operation.”2 The result is not altered by introducing money, as a medium of circulation, between
-the commodities, and making the sale and the purchase two distinct acts.3 The value of a
-commodity is expressed in its price before it goes into circulation, and is therefore a precedent
-condition of circulation, not its result.4
-Abstractedly considered, that is, apart from circumstances not immediately flowing from the laws
-of the simple circulation of commodities, there is in an exchange nothing (if we except the
-replacing of one use-value by another) but a metamorphosis, a mere change in the form of the
-commodity. The same exchange-value, i.e., the same quantity of incorporated social labour,
-remains throughout in the hands of the owner of the commodity, first in the shape of his own
-commodity, then in the form of the money for which he exchanged it, and lastly, in the shape of
-the commodity he buys with that money. This change of form does not imply a change in the
-magnitude of the value. But the change, which the value of the commodity undergoes in this
-process, is limited to a change in its money-form. This form exists first as the price of the
-commodity offered for sale, then as an actual sum of money, which, however, was already
-expressed in the price, and lastly, as the price of an equivalent commodity. This change of form
-no more implies, taken alone, a change in the quantity of value, than does the change of a £5 note
-into sovereigns, half sovereigns and shillings. So far therefore as the circulation of commodities
-effects a change in the form alone of their values, and is free from disturbing influences, it must
-be the exchange of equivalents. Little as Vulgar-Economy knows about the nature of value, yet
-whenever it wishes to consider the phenomena of circulation in their purity, it assumes that
-supply and demand are equal, which amounts to this, that their effect is nil. If therefore, as
-regards the use-values exchanged, both buyer and seller may possibly gain something, this is not
-the case as regards the exchange-values. Here we must rather say, “Where equality exists there
-can be no gain.”5 It is true, commodities may be sold at prices deviating from their values, but
-these deviations are to be considered as infractions of the laws of the exchange of commodities6,
-which in its normal state is an exchange of equivalents, consequently, no method for increasing
-value.7
-Hence, we see that behind all attempts to represent the circulation of commodities as a source of
-surplus-value, there lurks a quid pro quo, a mixing up of use-value and exchange-value. For
-instance, Condillac says: “It is not true that on an exchange of commodities we give value for
-value. On the contrary, each of the two contracting parties in every case, gives a less for a greater
-value. ... If we really exchanged equal values, neither party could make a profit. And yet, they
-both gain, or ought to gain. Why? The value of a thing consists solely in its relation to our wants.
-What is more to the one is less to the other, and vice versâ. ... It is not to be assumed that we offer
-for sale articles required for our own consumption. ... We wish to part with a useless thing, in
-order to get one that we need; we want to give less for more. ... It was natural to think that, in an
-exchange, value was given for value, whenever each of the articles exchanged was of equal value
-with the same quantity of gold. ... But there is another point to be considered in our calculation.
-The question is, whether we both exchange something superfluous for something necessary.” 8
-We see in this passage, how Condillac not only confuses use-value with exchange-value, but in a
-really childish manner assumes, that in a society, in which the production of commodities is well
-developed, each producer produces his own means of subsistence, and throws into circulation
-only the excess over his own requirements9 Still, Condillac’s argument is frequently used by
-113 Chapter 5
-modern economists, more especially when the point is to show, that the exchange of commodities
-in its developed form, commerce, is productive of surplus-value. For instance, “Commerce ...
-adds value to products, for the same products in the hands of consumers, are worth more than in
-the hands of producers, and it may strictly be considered an act of production.”10 But
-commodities are not paid for twice over, once on account of their use-value, and again on account
-of their value. And though the use-value of a commodity is more serviceable to the buyer than to
-the seller, its money-form is more serviceable to the seller. Would he otherwise sell it? We might
-therefore just as well say that the buyer performs “strictly an act of production,” by converting
-stockings, for example, into money.
-If commodities, or commodities and money, of equal exchange-value, and consequently
-equivalents, are exchanged, it is plain that no one abstracts more value from, than he throws into,
-circulation. There is no creation of surplus-value. And, in its normal form, the circulation of
-commodities demands the exchange of equivalents. But in actual practice, the process does not
-retain its normal form. Let us, therefore, assume an exchange of non-equivalents.
-In any case the market for commodities is only frequented by owners of commodities, and the
-power which these persons exercise over each other, is no other than the power of their
-commodities. The material variety of these commodities is the material incentive to the act of
-exchange, and makes buyers and sellers mutually dependent, because none of them possesses the
-object of his own wants, and each holds in his hand the object of another’s wants. Besides these
-material differences of their use-values, there is only one other difference between commodities,
-namely, that between their bodily form and the form into which they are converted by sale, the
-difference between commodities and money. And consequently the owners of commodities are
-distinguishable only as sellers, those who own commodities, and buyers, those who own money.
-Suppose then, that by some inexplicable privilege, the seller is enabled to sell his commodities
-above their value, what is worth 100 for 110, in which case the price is nominally raised 10%.
-The seller therefore pockets a surplus-value of 10. But after he has sold he becomes a buyer. A
-third owner of commodities comes to him now as seller, who in this capacity also enjoys the
-privilege of selling his commodities 10% too dear. Our friend gained 10 as a seller only to lose it
-again as a buyer.11 The net result is, that all owners of commodities sell their goods to one
-another at 10% above their value, which comes precisely to the same as if they sold them at their
-true value. Such a general and nominal rise of prices has the same effect as if the values had been
-expressed in weight of silver instead of in weight of gold. The nominal prices of commodities
-would rise, but the real relation between their values would remain unchanged.
-Let us make the opposite assumption, that the buyer has the privilege of purchasing commodities
-under their value. In this case it is no longer necessary to bear in mind that he in his turn will
-become a seller. He was so before he became buyer; he had already lost 10% in selling before he
-gained 10% as buyer.12 Everything is just as it was.
-The creation of surplus-value, and therefore the conversion of money into capital, can
-consequently be explained neither on the assumption that commodities are sold above their value,
-nor that they are bought below their value.13
-The problem is in no way simplified by introducing irrelevant matters after the manner of Col.
-Torrens: “Effectual demand consists in the power and inclination (!), on the part of consumers, to
-give for commodities, either by immediate or circuitous barter, some greater portion of ... capital
-than their production costs.”14 In relation to circulation, producers and consumers meet only as
-buyers and sellers. To assert that the surplus-value acquired by the producer has its origin in the
-fact that consumers pay for commodities more than their value, is only to say in other words: The
-owner of commodities possesses, as a seller, the privilege of selling too dear. The seller has
-114 Chapter 5
-himself produced the commodities or represents their producer, but the buyer has to no less extent
-produced the commodities represented by his money, or represents their producer. The distinction
-between them is, that one buys and the other sells. The fact that the owner of the commodities,
-under the designation of producer, sells them over their value, and under the designation of
-consumer, pays too much for them, does not carry us a single step further.15
-To be consistent therefore, the upholders of the delusion that surplus-value has its origin in a
-nominal rise of prices or in the privilege which the seller has of selling too dear, must assume the
-existence of a class that only buys and does not sell, i.e., only consumes and does not produce.
-The existence of such a class is inexplicable from the standpoint we have so far reached, viz., that
-of simple circulation. But let us anticipate. The money with which such a class is constantly
-making purchases, must constantly flow into their pockets, without any exchange, gratis, by
-might or right, from the pockets of the commodity-owners themselves. To sell commodities
-above their value to such a class, is only to crib back again a part of the money previously given
-to it.16 The towns of Asia Minor thus paid a yearly money tribute to ancient Rome. With this
-money Rome purchased from them commodities, and purchased them too dear. The provincials
-cheated the Romans, and thus got back from their conquerors, in the course of trade, a portion of
-the tribute. Yet, for all that, the conquered were the really cheated. Their goods were still paid for
-with their own money. That is not the way to get rich or to create surplus-value.
-Let us therefore keep within the bounds of exchange where sellers are also buyers, and buyers,
-sellers. Our difficulty may perhaps have arisen from treating the actors as personifications instead
-of as individuals.
-A may be clever enough to get the advantage of B or C without their being able to retaliate. A
-sells wine worth £40 to B, and obtains from him in exchange corn to the value of £50. A has
-converted his £40 into £50, has made more money out of less, and has converted his commodities
-into capital. Let us examine this a little more closely. Before the exchange we had £40 worth of
-wine in the hands of A, and £50 worth of corn in those of B, a total value of £90. After the
-exchange we have still the same total value of £90. The value in circulation has not increased by
-one iota, it is only distributed differently between A and B. What is a loss of value to B is surplus-
-value to A; what is “minus” to one is “plus” to the other. The same change would have taken
-place, if A, without the formality of an exchange, had directly stolen the £10 from B. The sum of
-the values in circulation can clearly not be augmented by any change in their distribution, any
-more than the quantity of the precious metals in a country by a Jew selling a Queen Anne’s
-farthing for a guinea. The capitalist class, as a whole, in any country, cannot over-reach
-themselves.17
-Turn and twist then as we may, the fact remains unaltered. If equivalents are exchanged, no
-surplus-value results, and if non-equivalents are exchanged, still no surplus-value.18 Circulation,
-or the exchange of commodities, begets no value.19
-The reason is now therefore plain why, in analysing the standard form of capital, the form under
-which it determines the economic organisation of modern society, we entirely left out of
-consideration its most popular, and, so to say, antediluvian forms, merchants’ capital and money-
-lenders’ capital.
-The circuit M—C—M, buying in order to sell dearer, is seen most clearly in genuine merchants’
-capital. But the movement takes place entirely within the sphere of circulation. Since, however, it
-is impossible, by circulation alone, to account for the conversion of money into capital, for the
-formation of surplus-value, it would appear, that merchants’ capital is an impossibility, so long as
-equivalents are exchanged;20 that, therefore, it can only have its origin in the two-fold advantage
-gained, over both the selling and the buying producers, by the merchant who parasitically shoves
-115 Chapter 5
-himself in between them. It is in this sense that Franklin says, “war is robbery, commerce is
-generally cheating.”21 If the transformation of merchants’ money into capital is to be explained
-otherwise than by the producers being simply cheated, a long series of intermediate steps would
-be necessary, which, at present, when the simple circulation of commodities forms our only
-assumption, are entirely wanting.
-What we have said with reference to merchants’ capital, applies still more to
-money-lenders’ capital. In merchants’ capital, the two extremes, the money that is
-thrown upon the market, and the augmented money that is withdrawn from the
-market, are at least connected by a purchase and a sale, in other words by the
-movement of the circulation. In money-lenders’ capital the form M—C—M is
-reduced to the two extremes without a mean, M—M , money exchanged for more
-money, a form that is incompatible with the nature of money, and therefore
-remains inexplicable from the standpoint of the circulation of commodities. Hence
-Aristotle: “since chrematistic is a double science, one part belonging to
-commerce, the other to economic, the latter being necessary and praiseworthy, the
-former based on circulation and with justice disapproved (for it is not based on
-Nature, but on mutual cheating), therefore the usurer is most rightly hated,
-because money itself is the source of his gain, and is not used for the purposes for
-which it was invented. For it originated for the exchange of commodities, but
-interest makes out of money, more money. Hence its name (τοκος interest and
-offspring). For the begotten are like those who beget them. But interest is money
-of money, so that of all modes of making a living, this is the most contrary to
-Nature.”22
-In the course of our investigation, we shall find that both merchants’ capital and interest-bearing
-capital are derivative forms, and at the same time it will become clear, why these two forms
-appear in the course of history before the modern standard form of capital.
-We have shown that surplus-value cannot be created by circulation, and, therefore, that in its
-formation, something must take place in the background, which is not apparent in the circulation
-itself.23 But can surplus-value possibly originate anywhere else than in circulation, which is the
-sum total of all the mutual relations of commodity-owners, as far as they are determined by their
-commodities? Apart from circulation, the commodity-owner is in relation only with his own
-commodity. So far as regards value, that relation is limited to this, that the commodity contains a
-quantity of his own labour, that quantity being measured by a definite social standard. This
-quantity is expressed by the value of the commodity, and since the value is reckoned in money of
-account, this quantity is also expressed by the price, which we will suppose to be £10. But his
-labour is not represented both by the value of the commodity, and by a surplus over that value,
-not by a price of 10 that is also a price of 11, not by a value that is greater than itself. The
-commodity owner can, by his labour, create value, but not self-expanding value. He can increase
-the value of his commodity, by adding fresh labour, and therefore more value to the value in
-hand, by making, for instance, leather into boots. The same material has now more value, because
-it contains a greater quantity of labour. The boots have therefore more value than the leather, but
-the value of the leather remains what it was; it has not expanded itself, has not, during the making
-of the boots, annexed surplus-value. It is therefore impossible that outside the sphere of
-circulation, a producer of commodities can, without coming into contact with other commodity-
-owners, expand value, and consequently convert money or commodities into capital.
-116 Chapter 5
-It is therefore impossible for capital to be produced by circulation, and it is equally impossible for
-it to originate apart from circulation. It must have its origin both in circulation and yet not in
-circulation.
-We have, therefore, got a double result.
-The conversion of money into capital has to be explained on the basis of the laws that regulate the
-exchange of commodities, in such a way that the starting-point is the exchange of equivalents.24
-Our friend, Moneybags, who as yet is only an embryo capitalist, must buy his commodities at
-their value, must sell them at their value, and yet at the end of the process must withdraw more
-value from circulation than he threw into it at starting. His development into a full-grown
-capitalist must take place, both within the sphere of circulation and without it. These are the
-conditions of the problem. Hic Rhodus, hic salta!25
-1 “L’échange est une transaction admirable dans laquelle les deux contractants gagnent ‒ toujours (!)”
-[“Exchange is a transaction in which the two contracting parties always gain, both of them (!)”]
-(Destutt de Tracy: “Traité de la Volonté et de ses effets.” Paris, 1826, p. 68.) This work appeared
-afterwards as “Traité d’Econ. Polit.”
-2 “Mercier de la Rivière,” l. c., p. 544.
-3 “Que l’une de ces deux valeurs soit argent, ou qu’elles soient toutes deux marchandises usuelles, rien
-de plus indifférent en soi.” [“Whether one of those two values is money, or they are both ordinary
-commodities, is in itself a matter of complete indifference.”] (“Mercier de la Rivière,” l.c., p. 543.)
-4 “Ce ne sont pas les contractants qui prononcent sur la valeur; elle est décidée avant la convention.”
-[“It is not the parties to a contract who decide on the value; that has been decided before the
-contract.”] (Le Trosne, p. 906.)
-5 “Dove è egualità non è lucro.” (Galiani, “Della Moneta in Custodi, Parte Moderna,” t. iv., p. 244.)
-6 “L’échange devient désavantageux pour l’une des parties, lorsque quelque chose étrangère vient
-diminuer ou exagérer le prix; alors l’égalité est blessée, mais la lésion procède de cette cause et non de
-l’échange.” [“The exchange becomes unfavourable for one of the parties when some external
-circumstance comes to lessen or increase the price; then equality is infringed, but this infringement
-arises from that cause and not from the exchange itself.”] (Le Trosne, l.c., p. 904.)
-7 “L’échange est de sa nature un contrat d’égalité qui se fait de valeur pour valeur égale. Il n’est donc
-pas un moyen de s’enrichir, puisque l’on donne autant que l’on reçoit.” [“Exchange is by its nature a
-contract which rests on equality, i.e., it takes place between two equal values, and it is not a means of
-self-enrichment, since as much is given as is received.”] (Le Trosne, l.c., p. 903.)
-8 Condillac: “Le Commerce et le Gouvernement” (1776). Edit. Daire et Molinari in the “Mélanges
-d’Econ. Polit.” Paris, 1847, pp. 267, 291.
-9 Le Trosne, therefore, answers his friend Condillac with justice as follows: “Dans une ... société
-formée il n’y a pas de surabondant en aucun genre.” [“In a developed society absolutely nothing is
-superfluous.”] At the same time, in a bantering way, he remarks: “If both the persons who exchange
-receive more to an equal amount, and part with less to an equal amount, they both get the same.” It is
-because Condillac has not the remotest idea of the nature of exchange-value that he has been chosen
-by Herr Professor Wilhelm Roscher as a proper person to answer for the soundness of his own
-childish notions. See Roscher’s “Die Grundlagen der Nationalökonomie, Dritte Auflage,” 1858.
-10 S. P. Newman: “Elements of Polit. Econ.” Andover and New York, 1835, p. 175.
-117 Chapter 5
-11 “By the augmentation of the nominal value of the produce... sellers not enriched... since what they
-gain as sellers, they precisely expend in the quality of buyers.” (“The Essential Principles of the
-Wealth of Nations.” &c., London, 1797, p. 66.)
-12 “Si l’on est forcé de donner pour 18 livres une quantité de telle production qui en valait 24,
-lorsqu’on employera ce même argent à acheter, on aura également pour 18 l. ce que l’on payait 24.”
-[“If one is compelled to sell a quantity of a certain product for 18 livres when it has a value of 24
-livres, when one employs the same amount of money in buying, one will receive for 18 livres the
-same quantity of the product as 24 livres would have bought otherwise.”] (Le Trosne, I. c., p. 897.)
-13 “Chaque vendeur ne peut donc parvenir à renchérir habituellement ses marchandises, qu’en se
-soumettant aussi à payer habituellement plus cher les marchandises des autres vendeurs; et par la
-même raison, chaque consommateur ne peut payer habituellement moins cher ce qu’il achète, qu’en se
-soumettant aussi à une diminution semblable sur le prix des choses qu’il vend.” [“A seller can
-normally only succeed in raising the prices of his commodities if he agrees to pay, by and large, more
-for the commodities of the other sellers; and for the same reason a consumer can normally only pay
-less for his purchases if he submits to a similar reduction in the prices of the things he sells.”] (Mercier
-de la Rivière, l.c., p. 555.)
-14 Torrens. “An Essay on the Production of Wealth.” London, 1821, p. 349.
-15 “The idea of profits being paid by the consumers, is, assuredly, very absurd. Who are the
-consumers?” (G. Ramsay: “An Essay on the Distribution of Wealth.” Edinburgh, 1836, p. 183.)
-16 “When a man is in want of a demand, does Mr. Malthus recommend him to pay some other person
-to take off his goods?” is a question put by an angry disciple of Ricardo to Malthus, who, like his
-disciple, Parson Chalmers, economically glorifies this class of simple buyers or consumers. (See “An
-Inquiry into those Principles Respecting the Nature of Demand and the Necessity of Consumption,
-lately advocated by Mr. Malthus,” &c. Lond., 1821, p. 55.)
-17 Destutt de Tracy, although, or perhaps because, he was a member of the Institute, held the opposite
-view. He says, industrial capitalists make profits because “they all sell for more than it has cost to
-produce. And to whom do they sell? In the first instance to one another.” (I. c., p. 239.)
-18 “L’échange qui se fait de deux valeurs égales n’augmente ni ne diminue la masse des valeurs
-subsistantes dans la société. L’échange de deux valeurs inégales ... ne change rien non plus à la
-somme des valeurs sociales, bien qu’il ajoute à la fortune de l’un ce qu’il ôte de la fortune de l’autre.”
-[“The exchange of two equal values neither increases nor diminishes the amount of the values
-available in society. Nor does the exchange of two unequal values ... change anything in the sum of
-social values, although it adds to the wealth of one person what it removes from the wealth of
-another.”] (J. B. Say, l.c., t. II, pp. 443, 444.) Say, not in the least troubled as to the consequences of
-this statement, borrows it, almost word for word, from the Physiocrats. The following example will
-show how Monsieur Say turned to account the writings of the Physiocrats, in his day quite forgotten,
-for the purpose of expanding the “value” of his own. His most celebrated saying, “On n’achète des
-produits qu’avec des produits” [“Products can only be bought with products.”](l.c., t. II. p. 441.) runs
-as follows in the original physiocratic work: “Les productions ne se paient qu’avec des productions.”
-[“Products can only be paid for with products.”] (Le Trosne, l.c., p. 899.)
-19 “Exchange confers no value at all upon products.” (F. Wayland: “The Elements of Political
-Economy.” Boston, 1843, p. 169.)
-20 Under the rule of invariable equivalents commerce would be impossible. (G. Opdyke: “A Treatise
-on Polit. Economy.” New York, 1851, pp. 66-69.) “The difference between real value and exchange-
-value is based upon this fact, namely, that the value of a thing is different from the so-called
-equivalent given for it in trade, i.e., that this equivalent is no equivalent.” (F. Engels, l.c., p. 96).
-118 Chapter 5
-21 Benjamin Franklin: Works, Vol. II, edit. Sparks in “Positions to be examined concerning National
-Wealth,” p. 376.
-22 Aristotle, I. c., c. 10.
-23 “Profit, in the usual condition of the market, is not made by exchanging. Had it not existed before,
-neither could it after that transaction.” (Ramsay, l.c., p. 184.)
-24 From the foregoing investigation, the reader will see that this statement only means that the
-formation of capital must be possible even though the price and value of a commodity be the same; for
-its formation cannot be attributed to any deviation of the one from the other. If prices actually differ
-from values, we must, first of all, reduce the former to the latter, in other words, treat the difference as
-accidental in order that the phenomena may be observed in their purity, and our observations not
-interfered with by disturbing circumstances that have nothing to do with the process in question. We
-know, moreover, that this reduction is no mere scientific process. The continual oscillations in prices,
-their rising and falling, compensate each other, and reduce themselves to an average price, which is
-their hidden regulator. It forms the guiding star of the merchant or the manufacturer in every
-undertaking that requires time. He knows that when a long period of time is taken, commodities are
-sold neither over nor under, but at their average price. If therefore he thought about the matter at all,
-he would formulate the problem of the formation of capital as follows: How can we account for the
-origin of capital on the supposition that prices are regulated by the average price, i. e., ultimately by
-the value of the commodities? I say “ultimately,” because average prices do not directly coincide with
-the values of commodities, as Adam Smith, Ricardo, and others believe.
-25 “Hic Rhodus, hic saltus!” – Latin, usually translated: “Rhodes is here, here is where you jump!”
-Originates from the traditional Latin translation of the punch line from Aesop’s fable The Boastful
-Athlete which has been the subject of some mistranslations. In Greek, the maxim reads:
-“ιδού η ρόδος,
-ιδού και το πήδημα”
-The story is that an athlete boasts that when in Rhodes, he performed a stupendous jump, and that
-there were witnesses who could back up his story. A bystander then remarked, ‘Alright! Let’s say this
-is Rhodes, demonstrate the jump here and now.’ The fable shows that people must be known by their
-deeds, not by their own claims for themselves. In the context in which Hegel used it in the Philosophy
-of Right, this could be taken to mean that the philosophy of right must have to do with the actuality of
-modern society, not the theories and ideals that societies create for themselves, nor, as Hegel goes on
-to say, to “teach the world what it ought to be.”
-The epigram is given by Hegel first in Greek, then in Latin (in the form “Hic Rhodus, hic saltus”), and
-he then says: “With little change, the above saying would read (in German): “Hier ist die Rose, hier
-tanze”: “Here is the rose, dance here”
-This is taken to be an allusion to the ‘rose in the cross’ of the Rosicrucians (who claimed to possess
-esoteric knowledge with which they could transform social life), implying that the material for
-understanding and changing society is given in society itself, not in some other-worldly theory,
-punning first on the Greek (Rhodos = Rhodes, rhodon = rose), then on the Latin (saltus = jump
-[noun], salta = dance [imperative]). [MIA Editors.]
-Chapter 6: The Buying and Selling of Labour-
-Power
-The change of value that occurs in the case of money intended to be converted into capital, cannot
-take place in the money itself, since in its function of means of purchase and of payment, it does
-no more than realise the price of the commodity it buys or pays for; and, as hard cash, it is value
-petrified, never varying.1 Just as little can it originate in the second act of circulation, the re-sale
-of the commodity, which does no more than transform the article from its bodily form back again
-into its money-form. The change must, therefore, take place in the commodity bought by the first
-act, M—C, but not in its value, for equivalents are exchanged, and the commodity is paid for at
-its full value. We are, therefore, forced to the conclusion that the change originates in the use-
-value, as such, of the commodity, i.e., in its consumption. In order to be able to extract value from
-the consumption of a commodity, our friend, Moneybags, must be so lucky as to find, within the
-sphere of circulation, in the market, a commodity, whose use-value possesses the peculiar
-property of being a source of value, whose actual consumption, therefore, is itself an embodiment
-of labour, and, consequently, a creation of value. The possessor of money does find on the market
-such a special commodity in capacity for labour or labour-power.
-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.
-But in order that our owner of money may be able to find labour-power offered for sale as a
-commodity, various conditions must first be fulfilled. The exchange of commodities of itself
-implies no other relations of dependence than those which result from its own nature. On this
-assumption, labour-power can appear upon the market as a commodity, only if, and so far as, its
-possessor, the individual whose labour-power it is, offers it for sale, or sells it, as a commodity. In
-order that he may be able to do this, he must have it at his disposal, must be the untrammelled
-owner of his capacity for labour, i.e., of his person.2 He and the owner of money meet in the
-market, and deal with each other as on the basis of equal rights, with this difference alone, that
-one is buyer, the other seller; both, therefore, equal in the eyes of the law. The continuance of this
-relation demands that the owner of the labour-power should sell it only for a definite period, for if
-he were to sell it rump and stump, once for all, he would be selling himself, converting himself
-from a free man into a slave, from an owner of a commodity into a commodity. He must
-constantly look upon his labour-power as his own property, his own commodity, and this he can
-only do by placing it at the disposal of the buyer temporarily, for a definite period of time. By this
-means alone can he avoid renouncing his rights of ownership over it.3
-The second essential condition to the owner of money finding labour-power in the market as a
-commodity is this – that the labourer instead of being in the position to sell commodities in which
-his labour is incorporated, must be obliged to offer for sale as a commodity that very labour-
-power, which exists only in his living self.
-In order that a man may be able to sell commodities other than labour-power, he must of course
-have the means of production, as raw material, implements, &c. No boots can be made without
-leather. He requires also the means of subsistence. Nobody – not even “a musician of the future”
-– can live upon future products, or upon use-values in an unfinished state; and ever since the first
-moment of his appearance on the world’s stage, man always has been, and must still be a
-consumer, both before and while he is producing. In a society where all products assume the form
-120 Chapter 6
-of commodities, these commodities must be sold after they have been produced, it is only after
-their sale that they can serve in satisfying the requirements of their producer. The time necessary
-for their sale is superadded to that necessary for their production.
-For the conversion of his money into capital, therefore, the owner of money must meet in the
-market with the free labourer, free in the double sense, that as a free man he can dispose of his
-labour-power as his own commodity, and that on the other hand he has no other commodity for
-sale, is short of everything necessary for the realisation of his labour-power.
-The question why this free labourer confronts him in the market, has no interest for the owner of
-money, who regards the labour-market as a branch of the general market for commodities. And
-for the present it interests us just as little. We cling to the fact theoretically, as he does practically.
-One thing, however, is clear – Nature does not produce on the one side owners of money or
-commodities, and on the other men possessing nothing but their own labour-power. This relation
-has no natural basis, neither is its social basis one that is common to all historical periods. It is
-clearly the result of a past historical development, the product of many economic revolutions, of
-the extinction of a whole series of older forms of social production.
-So, too, the economic categories, already discussed by us, bear the stamp of history. Definite
-historical conditions are necessary that a product may become a commodity. It must not be
-produced as the immediate means of subsistence of the producer himself. Had we gone further,
-and inquired under what circumstances all, or even the majority of products take the form of
-commodities, we should have found that this can only happen with production of a very specific
-kind, capitalist production. Such an inquiry, however, would have been foreign to the analysis of
-commodities. Production and circulation of commodities can take place, although the great mass
-of the objects produced are intended for the immediate requirements of their producers, are not
-turned into commodities, and consequently social production is not yet by a long way dominated
-in its length and breadth by exchange-value. The appearance of products as commodities pre-
-supposes such a development of the social division of labour, that the separation of use-value
-from exchange-value, a separation which first begins with barter, must already have been
-completed. But such a degree of development is common to many forms of society, which in
-other respects present the most varying historical features. On the other hand, if we consider
-money, its existence implies a definite stage in the exchange of commodities. The particular
-functions of money which it performs, either as the mere equivalent of commodities, or as means
-of circulation, or means of payment, as hoard or as universal money, point, according to the
-extent and relative preponderance of the one function or the other, to very different stages in the
-process of social production. Yet we know by experience that a circulation of commodities
-relatively primitive, suffices for the production of all these forms. Otherwise with capital. The
-historical conditions of its existence are by no means given with the mere circulation of money
-and commodities. It can spring into life, only when the owner of the means of production and
-subsistence meets in the market with the free labourer selling his labour-power. And this one
-historical condition comprises a world’s history. Capital, therefore, announces from its first
-appearance a new epoch in the process of social production.4
-We must now examine more closely this peculiar commodity, labour-power. Like all others it has
-a value.5 How is that value determined?
-The value of labour-power is determined, as in the case of every other commodity, by the labour-
-time necessary for the production, and consequently also the reproduction, of this special article.
-So far as it has value, it represents no more than a definite quantity of the average labour of
-society incorporated in it. Labour-power exists only as a capacity, or power of the living
-individual. Its production consequently pre-supposes his existence. Given the individual, the
-121 Chapter 6
-production of labour-power consists in his reproduction of himself or his maintenance. For his
-maintenance he requires a given quantity of the means of subsistence. Therefore the labour-time
-requisite for the production of labour-power reduces itself to that necessary for the production of
-those means of subsistence; in other words, the value of labour-power is the value of the means of
-subsistence necessary for the maintenance of the labourer. Labour-power, however, becomes a
-reality only by its exercise; it sets itself in action only by working. But thereby a definite quantity
-of human muscle, nerve, brain, &c., is wasted, and these require to be restored. This increased
-expenditure demands a larger income.6 If the owner of labour-power works to-day, to-morrow he
-must again be able to repeat the same process in the same conditions as regards health and
-strength. His means of subsistence must therefore be sufficient to maintain him in his normal state
-as a labouring individual. His natural wants, such as food, clothing, fuel, and housing, vary
-according to the climatic and other physical conditions of his country. On the other hand, the
-number and extent of his so-called necessary wants, as also the modes of satisfying them, are
-themselves the product of historical development, and depend therefore to a great extent on the
-degree of civilisation of a country, more particularly on the conditions under which, and
-consequently on the habits and degree of comfort in which, the class of free labourers has been
-formed.7 In contradistinction therefore to the case of other commodities, there enters into the
-determination of the value of labour-power a historical and moral element. Nevertheless, in a
-given country, at a given period, the average quantity of the means of subsistence necessary for
-the labourer is practically known.
-The owner of labour-power is mortal. If then his appearance in the market is to be continuous,
-and the continuous conversion of money into capital assumes this, the seller of labour-power
-must perpetuate himself, “in the way that every living individual perpetuates himself, by
-procreation.”8 The labour-power withdrawn from the market by wear and tear and death, must be
-continually replaced by, at the very least, an equal amount of fresh labour-power. Hence the sum
-of the means of subsistence necessary for the production of labour-power must include the means
-necessary for the labourer’s substitutes, i.e., his children, in order that this race of peculiar
-commodity-owners may perpetuate its appearance in the market.9
-In order to modify the human organism, so that it may acquire skill and handiness in a given
-branch of industry, and become labour-power of a special kind, a special education or training is
-requisite, and this, on its part, costs an equivalent in commodities of a greater or less amount.
-This amount varies according to the more or less complicated character of the labour-power. The
-expenses of this education (excessively small in the case of ordinary labour-power), enter pro
-tanto into the total value spent in its production.
-The value of labour-power resolves itself into the value of a definite quantity of the means of
-subsistence. It therefore varies with the value of these means or with the quantity of labour
-requisite for their production.
-Some of the means of subsistence, such as food and fuel, are consumed daily, and a fresh supply
-must be provided daily. Others such as clothes and furniture last for longer periods and require to
-be replaced only at longer intervals. One article must be bought or paid for daily, another weekly,
-another quarterly, and so on. But in whatever way the sum total of these outlays may be spread
-over the year, they must be covered by the average income, taking one day with another. If the
-total of the commodities required daily for the production of labour-power = A, and those
-required weekly = B, and those required quarterly = C, and so on, the daily average of these
-commodities = (365A + 52B + 4C + &c) / 365. Suppose that in this mass of commodities
-requisite for the average day there are embodied 6 hours of social labour, then there is
-incorporated daily in labour-power half a day’s average social labour, in other words, half a day’s
-122 Chapter 6
-labour is requisite for the daily production of labour-power. This quantity of labour forms the
-value of a day’s labour-power or the value of the labour-power daily reproduced. If half a day’s
-average social labour is incorporated in three shillings, then three shillings is the price
-corresponding to the value of a day’s labour-power. If its owner therefore offers it for sale at three
-shillings a day, its selling price is equal to its value, and according to our supposition, our friend
-Moneybags, who is intent upon converting his three shillings into capital, pays this value.
-The minimum limit of the value of labour-power is determined by the value of the commodities,
-without the daily supply of which the labourer cannot renew his vital energy, consequently by the
-value of those means of subsistence that are physically indispensable. If the price of labour-power
-fall to this minimum, it falls below its value, since under such circumstances it can be maintained
-and developed only in a crippled state. But the value of every commodity is determined by the
-labour-time requisite to turn it out so as to be of normal quality.
-It is a very cheap sort of sentimentality which declares this method of determining the value of
-labour-power, a method prescribed by the very nature of the case, to be a brutal method, and
-which wails with Rossi that, “To comprehend capacity for labour (puissance de travail) at the
-same time that we make abstraction from the means of subsistence of the labourers during the
-process of production, is to comprehend a phantom (être de raison). When we speak of labour, or
-capacity for labour, we speak at the same time of the labourer and his means of subsistence, of
-labourer and wages.”10 When we speak of capacity for labour, we do not speak of labour, any
-more than when we speak of capacity for digestion, we speak of digestion. The latter process
-requires something more than a good stomach. When we speak of capacity for labour, we do not
-abstract from the necessary means of subsistence. On the contrary, their value is expressed in its
-value. If his capacity for labour remains unsold, the labourer derives no benefit from it, but rather
-he will feel it to be a cruel nature-imposed necessity that this capacity has cost for its production a
-definite amount of the means of subsistence and that it will continue to do so for its reproduction.
-He will then agree with Sismondi: “that capacity for labour ... is nothing unless it is sold.”11
-One consequence of the peculiar nature of labour-power as a commodity is, that its use-value
-does not, on the conclusion of the contract between the buyer and seller, immediately pass into
-the hands of the former. Its value, like that of every other commodity, is already fixed before it
-goes into circulation, since a definite quantity of social labour has been spent upon it; but its use-
-value consists in the subsequent exercise of its force. The alienation of labour-power and its
-actual appropriation by the buyer, its employment as a use-value, are separated by an interval of
-time. But in those cases in which the formal alienation by sale of the use-value of a commodity, is
-not simultaneous with its actual delivery to the buyer, the money of the latter usually functions as
-means of payment.12 In every country in which the capitalist mode of production reigns, it is the
-custom not to pay for labour-power before it has been exercised for the period fixed by the
-contract, as for example, the end of each week. In all cases, therefore, the use-value of the labour-
-power is advanced to the capitalist: the labourer allows the buyer to consume it before he receives
-payment of the price; he everywhere gives credit to the capitalist. That this credit is no mere
-fiction, is shown not only by the occasional loss of wages on the bankruptcy of the capitalist,13
-but also by a series of more enduring consequences.14 Nevertheless, whether money serves as a
-means of purchase or as a means of payment, this makes no alteration in the nature of the
-exchange of commodities. The price of the labour-power is fixed by the contract, although it is
-not realised till later, like the rent of a house. The labour-power is sold, although it is only paid
-for at a later period. It will, therefore, be useful, for a clear comprehension of the relation of the
-parties, to assume provisionally, that the possessor of labour-power, on the occasion of each sale,
-immediately receives the price stipulated to be paid for it.
-123 Chapter 6
-We now know how the value paid by the purchaser to the possessor of this peculiar commodity,
-labour-power, is determined. The use-value which the former gets in exchange, manifests itself
-only in the actual utilisation, in the consumption of the labour-power. The money-owner buys
-everything necessary for this purpose, such as raw material, in the market, and pays for it at its
-full value. The consumption of labour-power is at one and the same time the production of
-commodities and of surplus-value. The consumption of labour-power is completed, as in the case
-of every other commodity, outside the limits of the market or of the sphere of circulation.
-Accompanied by Mr. Moneybags and by the possessor of labour-power, we therefore take leave
-for a time of this noisy sphere, where everything takes place on the surface and in view of all
-men, and follow them both into the hidden abode of production, on whose threshold there stares
-us in the face “No admittance except on business.” Here we shall see, not only how capital
-produces, but how capital is produced. We shall at last force the secret of profit making.
-This sphere that we are deserting, within whose boundaries the sale and purchase of labour-power
-goes on, is in fact a very Eden of the innate rights of man. There alone rule Freedom, Equality,
-Property and Bentham. Freedom, because both buyer and seller of a commodity, say of labour-
-power, are constrained only by their own free will. They contract as free agents, and the
-agreement they come to, is but the form in which they give legal expression to their common will.
-Equality, because each enters into relation with the other, as with a simple owner of commodities,
-and they exchange equivalent for equivalent. Property, because each disposes only of what is his
-own. And Bentham, because each looks only to himself. The only force that brings them together
-and puts them in relation with each other, is the selfishness, the gain and the private interests of
-each. Each looks to himself only, and no one troubles himself about the rest, and just because
-they do so, do they all, in accordance with the pre-established harmony of things, or under the
-auspices of an all-shrewd providence, work together to their mutual advantage, for the common
-weal and in the interest of all.
-On leaving this sphere of simple circulation or of exchange of commodities, which furnishes the
-“Free-trader Vulgaris” with his views and ideas, and with the standard by which he judges a
-society based on capital and wages, we think we can perceive a change in the physiognomy of our
-dramatis personae. He, who before was the money-owner, now strides in front as capitalist; the
-possessor of labour-power follows as his labourer. The one with an air of importance, smirking,
-intent on business; the other, timid and holding back, like one who is bringing his own hide to
-market and has nothing to expect but – a hiding.
-1 “In the form of money ... capital is productive of no profit.” (Ricardo: “Princ. of Pol. Econ.,” p. 267.)
-2 In encyclopaedias of classical antiquities we find such nonsense as this — that in the ancient world
-capital was fully developed, “except that the free labourer and a system of credit was wanting.”
-Mommsen also, in his “History of Rome,” commits, in this respect, one blunder after another.
-3 Hence legislation in various countries fixes a maximum for labour-contracts. Wherever free labour is
-the rule, the laws regulate the mode of terminating this contract. In some States, particularly in Mexico
-(before the American Civil War, also in the territories taken from Mexico, and also, as a matter of
-fact, in the Danubian provinces till the revolution effected by Kusa), slavery is hidden under the form
-of peonage. By means of advances, repayable in labour, which are handed down from generation to
-generation, not only the individual labourer, but his family, become, de facto, the property of other
-persons and their families. Juarez abolished peonage. The so-called Emperor Maximilian re-
-established it by a decree, which, in the House of Representatives at Washington, was aptly
-denounced as a decree for the re-introduction of slavery into Mexico. “I may make over to another the
-124 Chapter 6
-use, for a limited time, of my particular bodily and mental aptitudes and capabilities; because in
-consequence of this restriction, they are impressed with a character of alienation with regard to me as
-a whole. But by the alienation of all my labour-time and the whole of my work, I should be converting
-the substance itself, in other words, my general activity and reality, my person, into the property of
-another.” (Hegel, “Philosophie des Rechts.” Berlin, 1840, p. 104, § 67.)
-4 The capitalist epoch is therefore characterised by this, that labour-power takes in the eyes of the
-labourer himself the form of a commodity which is his property; his labour consequently becomes
-wage-labour. On the other hand, it is only from this moment that the produce of labour universally
-becomes a commodity.
-5 “The value or worth of a man, is as of all other things his price — that is to say, so much as would be
-given for the use of his power.” (Th. Hobbes: “Leviathan” in Works, Ed. Molesworth. Lond. 1839-44,
-v. iii. p. 76.)
-6 Hence the Roman Villicus, as overlooker of the agricultural slaves, received “more meagre fare than
-working slaves, because his work was lighter.” (Th. Mommsen, Röm. Geschichte, 1856, p. 810.)
-7 Compare W. Th. Thornton: “Over-population and its Remedy,” Lond., 1846.
-8 Petty.
-9 “Its (labour’s) natural price ... consists in such a quantity of necessaries and comforts of life, as, from
-the nature of the climate, and the habits of the country, are necessary to support the labourer, and to
-enable him to rear such a family as may preserve, in the market, an undiminished supply of labour.”
-(R. Torrens: “An Essay on the External Corn Trade.” Lond. 1815, p. 62.) The word labour is here
-wrongly used for labour-power.
-10 Rossi: “Cours d’Econ. Polit.,” Bruxelles, 1842, p. 370.
-11 Sismondi: “Nouv. Princ. etc.,” t. I, p. 112.
-12 “All labour is paid after it has ceased.” (“An Inquiry into those Principles Respecting the Nature of
-Demand,” &c., p. 104.) Le crédit commercial a dû commencer au moment où l’ouvrier, premier
-artisan de la production, a pu, au moyen de ses économies, attendre le salaire de son travail jusqu’à la
-fin de la semaine, de la quinzaine, du mois, du trimestre, &c.” [“The system of commercial credit had
-to start at the moment when the labourer, the prime creator of products, could, thanks to his savings,
-wait for his wages until the end of the week.”] (Ch. Ganilh: “Des Systèmes d’Econ. Polit.” 2éme édit.
-Paris, 1821, t. II, p. 150.)
-13 “L’ouvrier prête son industrie,” but adds Storch slyly: he “risks nothing” except “de perdre son
-salaire ... l’ouvrier ne transmet rien de matériel.” [“The labourer lends his industry ... the loss of his
-wages ... the labourer does not hand over anything of a material nature.”] (Storch: “Cours d’Econ.
-Polit.” Pétersbourg, 1815, t. II., p. 37.)
-14 One example. In London there are two sorts of bakers, the “full priced,” who sell bread at its full
-value, and the “undersellers,” who sell it under its value. The latter class comprises more than three-
-fourths of the total number of bakers. (p. xxxii in the Report of H. S. Tremenheere, commissioner to
-examine into “the grievances complained of by the journeymen bakers,” &c., Lond. 1862.) The
-undersellers, almost without exception, sell bread adulterated with alum, soap, pearl ashes, chalk,
-Derbyshire stone-dust, and such like agreeable nourishing and wholesome ingredients. (See the above
-cited Blue book, as also the report of “the committee of 1855 on the adulteration of bread,” and Dr.
-Hassall’s “Adulterations Detected,” 2nd Ed. Lond. 1861.) Sir John Gordon stated before the
-committee of 1855, that “in consequence of these adulterations, the poor man, who lives on two
-pounds of bread a day, does not now get one fourth part of nourishing matter, let alone the deleterious
-effects on his health.” Tremenheere states (l.c., p. xlviii), as the reason, why a very large part of the
-working-class, although well aware of this adulteration, nevertheless accept the alum, stone-dust, &c.,
-125 Chapter 6
-as part of their purchase: that it is for them “a matter of necessity to take from their baker or from the
-chandler’s shop, such bread as they choose to supply.” As they are not paid their wages before the end
-of the week, they in their turn are unable “to pay for the bread consumed by their families, during the
-week, before the end of the week,” and Tremenheere adds on the evidence of witnesses, “it is
-notorious that bread composed of those mixtures, is made expressly for sale in this manner.” In many
-English and still more Scotch agricultural districts, wages are paid fortnightly and even monthly; with
-such long intervals between the payments, the agricultural labourer is obliged to buy on credit.... He
-must pay higher prices, and is in fact tied to the shop which gives him credit. Thus at Horningham in
-Wilts, for example, where the wages are monthly, the same flour that he could buy elsewhere at 1s
-10d per stone, costs him 2s 4d per stone. (“Sixth Report” on “Public Health” by “The Medical Officer
-of the Privy Council, &c., 1864,” p.264.) “The block printers of Paisley and Kilmarnock enforced, by
-a strike, fortnightly, instead of monthly payment of wages.” (“Reports of the Inspectors of Factories
-for 31st Oct., 1853,” p. 34.) As a further pretty result of the credit given by the workmen to the
-capitalist, we may refer to the method current in many English coal mines, where the labourer is not
-paid till the end of the month, and in the meantime, receives sums on account from the capitalist, often
-in goods for which the miner is obliged to pay more than the market price (Truck-system). “It is a
-common practice with the coal masters to pay once a month, and advance cash to their workmen at the
-end of each intermediate week. The cash is given in the shop” (i.e., the Tommy shop which belongs to
-the master); “the men take it on one side and lay it out on the other.” (“Children’s Employment
-Commission, III. Report,” Lond. 1864, p. 38, n. 192.)
-Part 3: The Production of Absolute
-Surplus-Value
-127 Chapter 7
-Chapter 7: The Labour-Process and the Process
-of Producing Surplus-Value
-Section 1: The Labour-Process or the Production of Use-Values
-The capitalist buys labour-power in order to use it; and labour-power in use is labour itself. The
-purchaser of labour-power consumes it by setting the seller of it to work. By working, the latter
-becomes actually, what before he only was potentially, labour-power in action, a labourer. In
-order that his labour may re-appear in a commodity, he must, before all things, expend it on
-something useful, on something capable of satisfying a want of some sort. Hence, what the
-capitalist sets the labourer to produce, is a particular use-value, a specified article. The fact that
-the production of use-values, or goods, is carried on under the control of a capitalist and on his
-behalf, does not alter the general character of that production. We shall, therefore, in the first
-place, have to consider the labour-process independently of the particular form it assumes under
-given social conditions.
-Labour is, in the first place, a process in which both man and Nature participate, and in which
-man of his own accord starts, regulates, and controls the material re-actions between himself and
-Nature. He opposes himself to Nature as one of her own forces, setting in motion arms and legs,
-head and hands, the natural forces of his body, in order to appropriate Nature’s productions in a
-form adapted to his own wants. By thus acting on the external world and changing it, he at the
-same time changes his own nature. He develops his slumbering powers and compels them to act
-in obedience to his sway. We are not now dealing with those primitive instinctive forms of labour
-that remind us of the mere animal. An immeasurable interval of time separates the state of things
-in which a man brings his labour-power to market for sale as a commodity, from that state in
-which human labour was still in its first instinctive stage. We pre-suppose labour in a form that
-stamps it as exclusively human. A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver,
-and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes
-the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in
-imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labour-process, we get a result that
-already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement. He not only effects a
-change of form in the material on which he works, but he also realises a purpose of his own that
-gives the law to his modus operandi, and to which he must subordinate his will. And this
-subordination is no mere momentary act. Besides the exertion of the bodily organs, the process
-demands that, during the whole operation, the workman’s will be steadily in consonance with his
-purpose. This means close attention. The less he is attracted by the nature of the work, and the
-mode in which it is carried on, and the less, therefore, he enjoys it as something which gives play
-to his bodily and mental powers, the more close his attention is forced to be.
-The elementary factors of the labour-process are 1, the personal activity of man, i.e., work itself,
-2, the subject of that work, and 3, its instruments.
-The soil (and this, economically speaking, includes water) in the virgin state in which it supplies 1
-man with necessaries or the means of subsistence ready to hand, exists independently of him, and
-is the universal subject of human labour. All those things which labour merely separates from
-immediate connexion with their environment, are subjects of labour spontaneously provided by
-Nature. Such are fish which we catch and take from their element, water, timber which we fell in
-the virgin forest, and ores which we extract from their veins. If, on the other hand, the subject of
-labour has, so to say, been filtered through previous labour, we call it raw material; such is ore
-128 Chapter 7
-already extracted and ready for washing. All raw material is the subject of labour, but not every
-subject of labour is raw material: it can only become so, after it has undergone some alteration by
-means of labour.
-An instrument of labour is a thing, or a complex of things, which the labourer interposes between
-himself and the subject of his labour, and which serves as the conductor of his activity. He makes
-use of the mechanical, physical, and chemical properties of some substances in order to make
-other substances subservient to his aims.2 Leaving out of consideration such ready-made means
-of subsistence as fruits, in gathering which a man’s own limbs serve as the instruments of his
-labour, the first thing of which the labourer possesses himself is not the subject of labour but its
-instrument. Thus Nature becomes one of the organs of his activity, one that he annexes to his own
-bodily organs, adding stature to himself in spite of the Bible. As the earth is his original larder, so
-too it is his original tool house. It supplies him, for instance, with stones for throwing, grinding,
-pressing, cutting, &c. The earth itself is an instrument of labour, but when used as such in
-agriculture implies a whole series of other instruments and a comparatively high development of
-labour.3 No sooner does labour undergo the least development, than it requires specially prepared
-instruments. Thus in the oldest caves we find stone implements and weapons. In the earliest
-period of human history domesticated animals, i.e., animals which have been bred for the
-purpose, and have undergone modifications by means of labour, play the chief part as instruments
-of labour along with specially prepared stones, wood, bones, and shells.4 The use and fabrication
-of instruments of labour, although existing in the germ among certain species of animals, is
-specifically characteristic of the human labour-process, and Franklin therefore defines man as a
-tool-making animal. Relics of bygone instruments of labour possess the same importance for the
-investigation of extinct economic forms of society, as do fossil bones for the determination of
-extinct species of animals. It is not the articles made, but how they are made, and by what
-instruments, that enables us to distinguish different economic epochs. 5 Instruments of labour not
-only supply a standard of the degree of development to which human labour has attained, but they
-are also indicators of the social conditions under which that labour is carried on. Among the
-instruments of labour, those of a mechanical nature, which, taken as a whole, we may call the
-bone and muscles of production, offer much more decided characteristics of a given epoch of
-production, than those which, like pipes, tubs, baskets, jars, &c., serve only to hold the materials
-for labour, which latter class, we may in a general way, call the vascular system of production.
-The latter first begins to play an important part in the chemical industries.
-In a wider sense we may include among the instruments of labour, in addition to those things that
-are used for directly transferring labour to its subject, and which therefore, in one way or another,
-serve as conductors of activity, all such objects as are necessary for carrying on the labour-
-process. These do not enter directly into the process, but without them it is either impossible for it
-to take place at all, or possible only to a partial extent. Once more we find the earth to be a
-universal instrument of this sort, for it furnishes a locus standi to the labourer and a field of
-employment for his activity. Among instruments that are the result of previous labour and also
-belong to this class, we find workshops, canals, roads, and so forth.
-In the labour-process, therefore, man’s activity, with the help of the instruments of labour, effects
-an alteration, designed from the commencement, in the material worked upon. The process
-disappears in the product, the latter is a use-value, Nature’s material adapted by a change of form
-to the wants of man. Labour has incorporated itself with its subject: the former is materialised, the
-latter transformed. That which in the labourer appeared as movement, now appears in the product
-as a fixed quality without motion. The blacksmith forges and the product is a forging.
-129 Chapter 7
-If we examine the whole process from the point of view of its result, the product, it is plain that
-both the instruments and the subject of labour, are means of production,6 and that the labour itself
-is productive labour.7
-Though a use-value, in the form of a product, issues from the labour-process, yet other use-
-values, products of previous labour, enter into it as means of production. The same use-value is
-both the product of a previous process, and a means of production in a later process. Products are
-therefore not only results, but also essential conditions of labour.
-With the exception of the extractive industries, in which the material for labour is provided
-immediately by Nature, such as mining, hunting, fishing, and agriculture (so far as the latter is
-confined to breaking up virgin soil), all branches of industry manipulate raw material, objects
-already filtered through labour, already products of labour. Such is seed in agriculture. Animals
-and plants, which we are accustomed to consider as products of Nature, are in their present form,
-not only products of, say last year’s labour, but the result of a gradual transformation, continued
-through many generations, under man’s superintendence, and by means of his labour. But in the
-great majority of cases, instruments of labour show even to the most superficial observer, traces
-of the labour of past ages.
-Raw material may either form the principal substance of a product, or it may enter into its
-formation only as an accessory. An accessory may be consumed by the instruments of labour, as
-coal under a boiler, oil by a wheel, hay by draft-horses, or it may be mixed with the raw material
-in order to produce some modification thereof, as chlorine into unbleached linen, coal with iron,
-dye-stuff with wool, or again, it may help to carry on the work itself, as in the case of the
-materials used for heating and lighting workshops. The distinction between principal substance
-and accessory vanishes in the true chemical industries, because there none of the raw material re-
-appears, in its original composition, in the substance of the product.8
-Every object possesses various properties, and is thus capable of being applied to different uses.
-One and the same product may therefore serve as raw material in very different processes. Corn,
-for example, is a raw material for millers, starch-manufacturers, distillers, and cattlebreeders. It
-also enters as raw material into its own production in the shape of seed; coal, too, is at the same
-time the product of, and a means of production in, coal-mining.
-Again, a particular product may be used in one and the same process, both as an instrument of
-labour and as raw material. Take, for instance, the fattening of cattle, where the animal is the raw
-material, and at the same time an instrument for the production of manure.
-A product, though ready for immediate consumption, may yet serve as raw material for a further
-product, as grapes when they become the raw material for wine. On the other hand, labour may
-give us its product in such a form, that we can use it only as raw material, as is the case with
-cotton, thread, and yarn. Such a raw material, though itself a product, may have to go through a
-whole series of different processes: in each of these in turn, it serves, with constantly varying
-form, as raw material, until the last process of the series leaves it a perfect product, ready for
-individual consumption, or for use as an instrument of labour.
-Hence we see, that whether a use-value is to be regarded as raw material, as instrument of labour,
-or as product, this is determined entirely by its function in the labour-process, by the position it
-there occupies: as this varies, so does its character.
-Whenever therefore a product enters as a means of production into a new labour-process, it
-thereby loses its character of product, and becomes a mere factor in the process. A spinner treats
-spindles only as implements for spinning, and flax only as the material that he spins. Of course it
-is impossible to spin without material and spindles; and therefore the existence of these things as
-130 Chapter 7
-products, at the commencement of the spinning operation, must be presumed: but in the process
-itself, the fact that they are products of previous labour, is a matter of utter indifference; just as in
-the digestive process, it is of no importance whatever, that bread is the produce of the previous
-labour of the farmer, the miller, and the baker. On the contrary, it is generally by their
-imperfections as products, that the means of production in any process assert themselves in their
-character of products. A blunt knife or weak thread forcibly remind us of Mr. A., the cutler, or
-Mr. B., the spinner. In the finished product the labour by means of which it has acquired its useful
-qualities is not palpable, has apparently vanished.
-A machine which does not serve the purposes of labour, is useless. In addition, it falls a prey to
-the destructive influence of natural forces. Iron rusts and wood rots. Yarn with which we neither
-weave nor knit, is cotton wasted. Living labour must seize upon these things and rouse them from
-their death-sleep, change them from mere possible use-values into real and effective ones. Bathed
-in the fire of labour, appropriated as part and parcel of labour’s organism, and, as it were, made
-alive for the performance of their functions in the process, they are in truth consumed, but
-consumed with a purpose, as elementary constituents of new use-values, of new products, ever
-ready as means of subsistence for individual consumption, or as means of production for some
-new labour-process.
-If then, on the one hand, finished products are not only results, but also necessary conditions, of
-the labour-process, on the other hand, their assumption into that process, their contact with living
-labour, is the sole means by which they can be made to retain their character of use-values, and be
-utilised.
-Labour uses up its material factors, its subject and its instruments, consumes them, and is
-therefore a process of consumption. Such productive consumption is distinguished from
-individual consumption by this, that the latter uses up products, as means of subsistence for the
-living individual; the former, as means whereby alone, labour, the labour-power of the living
-individual, is enabled to act. The product, therefore, of individual consumption, is the consumer
-himself; the result of productive consumption, is a product distinct from the consumer.
-In so far then, as its instruments and subjects are themselves products, labour consumes products
-in order to create products, or in other words, consumes one set of products by turning them into
-means of production for another set. But, just as in the beginning, the only participators in the
-labour-process were man and the earth, which latter exists independently of man, so even now we
-still employ in the process many means of production, provided directly by Nature, that do not
-represent any combination of natural substances with human labour.
-The labour-process, resolved as above into its simple elementary factors, is human action with a
-view to the production of use-values, appropriation of natural substances to human requirements;
-it is the necessary condition for effecting exchange of matter between man and Nature; it is the
-everlasting Nature-imposed condition of human existence, and therefore is independent of every
-social phase of that existence, or rather, is common to every such phase. It was, therefore, not
-necessary to represent our labourer in connexion with other labourers; man and his labour on one
-side, Nature and its materials on the other, sufficed. As the taste of the porridge does not tell you
-who grew the oats, no more does this simple process tell you of itself what are the social
-conditions under which it is taking place, whether under the slave-owner’s brutal lash, or the
-anxious eye of the capitalist, whether Cincinnatus carries it on in tilling his modest farm or a
-savage in killing wild animals with stones.9
-Let us now return to our would-be capitalist. We left him just after he had purchased, in the open
-market, all the necessary factors of the labour process; its objective factors, the means of
-production, as well as its subjective factor, labour-power. With the keen eye of an expert, he has
-131 Chapter 7
-selected the means of production and the kind of labour-power best adapted to his particular
-trade, be it spinning, bootmaking, or any other kind. He then proceeds to consume the
-commodity, the labour-power that he has just bought, by causing the labourer, the impersonation
-of that labour-power, to consume the means of production by his labour. The general character of
-the labour-process is evidently not changed by the fact, that the labourer works for the capitalist
-instead of for himself; moreover, the particular methods and operations employed in bootmaking
-or spinning are not immediately changed by the intervention of the capitalist. He must begin by
-taking the labour-power as he finds it in the market, and consequently be satisfied with labour of
-such a kind as would be found in the period immediately preceding the rise of capitalists.
-Changes in the methods of production by the subordination of labour to capital, can take place
-only at a later period, and therefore will have to be treated of in a later chapter.
-The labour-process, turned into the process by which the capitalist consumes labour-power,
-exhibits two characteristic phenomena. First, the labourer works under the control of the capitalist
-to whom his labour belongs; the capitalist taking good care that the work is done in a proper
-manner, and that the means of production are used with intelligence, so that there is no
-unnecessary waste of raw material, and no wear and tear of the implements beyond what is
-necessarily caused by the work.
-Secondly, the product is the property of the capitalist and not that of the labourer, its immediate
-producer. Suppose that a capitalist pays for a day’s labour-power at its value; then the right to use
-that power for a day belongs to him, just as much as the right to use any other commodity, such as
-a horse that he has hired for the day. To the purchaser of a commodity belongs its use, and the
-seller of labour-power, by giving his labour, does no more, in reality, than part with the use-value
-that he has sold. From the instant he steps into the workshop, the use-value of his labour-power,
-and therefore also its use, which is labour, belongs to the capitalist. By the purchase of labour-
-power, the capitalist incorporates labour, as a living ferment, with the lifeless constituents of the
-product. From his point of view, the labour-process is nothing more than the consumption of the
-commodity purchased, i. e., of labour-power; but this consumption cannot be effected except by
-supplying the labour-power with the means of production. The labour-process is a process
-between things that the capitalist has purchased, things that have become his property. The
-product of this process belongs, therefore, to him, just as much as does the wine which is the
-product of a process of fermentation completed in his cellar.10
-Section 2: The Production of Surplus-Value
-The product appropriated by the capitalist is a use-value, as yarn, for example, or boots. But,
-although boots are, in one sense, the basis of all social progress, and our capitalist is a decided
-“progressist,” yet he does not manufacture boots for their own sake. Use-value is, by no means,
-the thing “qu’on aime pour lui-même” in the production of commodities. Use-values are only
-produced by capitalists, because, and in so far as, they are the material substratum, the
-depositories of exchange-value. Our capitalist has two objects in view: in the first place, he wants
-to produce a use-value that has a value in exchange, that is to say, an article destined to be sold, a
-commodity; and secondly, he desires to produce a commodity whose value shall be greater than
-the sum of the values of the commodities used in its production, that is, of the means of
-production and the labour-power, that he purchased with his good money in the open market. His
-aim is to produce not only a use-value, but a commodity also; not only use-value, but value; not
-only value, but at the same time surplus-value.
-It must be borne in mind, that we are now dealing with the production of commodities, and that,
-up to this point, we have only considered one aspect of the process. Just as commodities are, at
-132 Chapter 7
-the same time, use-values and values, so the process of producing them must be a labour-process,
-and at the same time, a process of creating value.11
-Let us now examine production as a creation of value.
-We know that the value of each commodity is determined by the quantity of labour expended on
-and materialised in it, by the working-time necessary, under given social conditions, for its
-production. This rule also holds good in the case of the product that accrued to our capitalist, as
-the result of the labour-process carried on for him. Assuming this product to be 10 lbs. of yarn,
-our first step is to calculate the quantity of labour realised in it.
-For spinning the yarn, raw material is required; suppose in this case 10 lbs. of cotton. We have no
-need at present to investigate the value of this cotton, for our capitalist has, we will assume,
-bought it at its full value, say of ten shillings. In this price the labour required for the production
-of the cotton is already expressed in terms of the average labour of society. We will further
-assume that the wear and tear of the spindle, which, for our present purpose, may represent all
-other instruments of labour employed, amounts to the value of 2s. If, then, twenty-four hours’
-labour, or two working days, are required to produce the quantity of gold represented by twelve
-shillings, we have here, to begin with, two days’ labour already incorporated in the yarn.
-We must not let ourselves be misled by the circumstance that the cotton has taken a new shape
-while the substance of the spindle has to a certain extent been used up. By the general law of
-value, if the value of 40 lbs. of yarn = the value of 40 lbs. of cotton + the value of a whole
-spindle, i. e., if the same working-time is required to produce the commodities on either side of
-this equation, then 10 lbs. of yarn are an equivalent for 10 lbs. of cotton, together with one-fourth
-of a spindle. In the case we are considering the same working-time is materialised in the 10 lbs. of
-yarn on the one hand, and in the 10 lbs. of cotton and the fraction of a spindle on the other.
-Therefore, whether value appears in cotton, in a spindle, or in yarn, makes no difference in the
-amount of that value. The spindle and cotton, instead of resting quietly side by side, join together
-in the process, their forms are altered, and they are turned into yarn; but their value is no more
-affected by this fact than it would be if they had been simply exchanged for their equivalent in
-yarn.
-The labour required for the production of the cotton, the raw material of the yarn, is part of the
-labour necessary to produce the yarn, and is therefore contained in the yarn. The same applies to
-the labour embodied in the spindle, without whose wear and tear the cotton could not be spun.
-Hence, in determining the value of the yarn, or the labour-time required for its production, all the
-special processes carried on at various times and in different places, which were necessary, first
-to produce the cotton and the wasted portion of the spindle, and then with the cotton and spindle
-to spin the yarn, may together be looked on as different and successive phases of one and the
-same process. The whole of the labour in the yarn is past labour; and it is a matter of no
-importance that the operations necessary for the production of its constituent elements were
-carried on at times which, referred to the present, are more remote than the final operation of
-spinning. If a definite quantity of labour, say thirty days, is requisite to build a house, the total
-amount of labour incorporated in it is not altered by the fact that the work of the last day is done
-twenty-nine days later than that of the first. Therefore the labour contained in the raw material
-and the instruments of labour can be treated just as if it were labour expended in an earlier stage
-of the spinning process, before the labour of actual spinning commenced.
-The values of the means of production, i. e., the cotton and the spindle, which values are
-expressed in the price of twelve shillings, are therefore constituent parts of the value of the yarn,
-or, in other words, of the value of the product.
-133 Chapter 7
-Two conditions must nevertheless be fulfilled. First, the cotton and spindle must concur in the
-production of a use-value; they must in the present case become yarn. Value is independent of the
-particular use-value by which it is borne, but it must be embodied in a use-value of some kind.
-Secondly, the time occupied in the labour of production must not exceed the time really necessary
-under the given social conditions of the case. Therefore, if no more than 1 lb. of cotton be
-requisite to spin 1 lb. of yarn, care must be taken that no more than this weight of cotton is
-consumed in the production of 1 lb. of yarn; and similarly with regard to the spindle. Though the
-capitalist have a hobby, and use a gold instead of a steel spindle, yet the only labour that counts
-for anything in the value of the yarn is that which would be required to produce a steel spindle,
-because no more is necessary under the given social conditions.
-We now know what portion of the value of the yarn is owing to the cotton and the spindle. It
-amounts to twelve shillings or the value of two days’ work. The next point for our consideration
-is, what portion of the value of the yarn is added to the cotton by the labour of the spinner.
-We have now to consider this labour under a very different aspect from that which it had during
-the labour-process; there, we viewed it solely as that particular kind of human activity which
-changes cotton into yarn; there, the more the labour was suited to the work, the better the yarn,
-other circumstances remaining the same. The labour of the spinner was then viewed as
-specifically different from other kinds of productive labour, different on the one hand in its
-special aim, viz., spinning, different, on the other hand, in the special character of its operations,
-in the special nature of its means of production and in the special use-value of its product. For the
-operation of spinning, cotton and spindles are a necessity, but for making rifled cannon they
-would be of no use whatever. Here, on the contrary, where we consider the labour of the spinner
-only so far as it is value-creating, i.e., a source of value, his labour differs in no respect from the
-labour of the man who bores cannon, or (what here more nearly concerns us), from the labour of
-the cotton-planter and spindle-maker incorporated in the means of production. It is solely by
-reason of this identity, that cotton planting, spindle making and spinning, are capable of forming
-the component parts differing only quantitatively from each other, of one whole, namely, the
-value of the yarn. Here, we have nothing more to do with the quality, the nature and the specific
-character of the labour, but merely with its quantity. And this simply requires to be calculated.
-We proceed upon the assumption that spinning is simple, unskilled labour, the average labour of a
-given state of society. Hereafter we shall see that the contrary assumption would make no
-difference.
-While the labourer is at work, his labour constantly undergoes a transformation: from being
-motion, it becomes an object without motion; from being the labourer working, it becomes the
-thing produced. At the end of one hour’s spinning, that act is represented by a definite quantity of
-yarn; in other words, a definite quantity of labour, namely that of one hour, has become embodied
-in the cotton. We say labour, i.e., the expenditure of his vital force by the spinner, and not
-spinning labour, because the special work of spinning counts here, only so far as it is the
-expenditure of labour-power in general, and not in so far as it is the specific work of the spinner.
-In the process we are now considering it is of extreme importance, that no more time be
-consumed in the work of transforming the cotton into yarn than is necessary under the given
-social conditions. If under normal, i.e., average social conditions of production, a pounds of
-cotton ought to be made into b pounds of yarn by one hour’s labour, then a day’s labour does not
-count as 12 hours’ labour unless 12 a pounds of cotton have been made into 12 b pounds of yarn;
-for in the creation of value, the time that is socially necessary alone counts.
-Not only the labour, but also the raw material and the product now appear in quite a new light,
-very different from that in which we viewed them in the labour-process pure and simple. The raw
-134 Chapter 7
-material serves now merely as an absorbent of a definite quantity of labour. By this absorption it
-is in fact changed into yarn, because it is spun, because labour-power in the form of spinning is
-added to it; but the product, the yarn, is now nothing more than a measure of the labour absorbed
-by the cotton. If in one hour 1 2/3 lbs. of cotton can be spun into 1 2/3 lbs. of yarn, then 10 lbs. of
-yarn indicate the absorption of 6 hours’ labour. Definite quantities of product, these quantities
-being determined by experience, now represent nothing but definite quantities of labour, definite
-masses of crystallised labour-time. They are nothing more than the materialisation of so many
-hours or so many days of social labour.
-We are here no more concerned about the facts, that the labour is the specific work of spinning,
-that its subject is cotton and its product yarn, than we are about the fact that the subject itself is
-already a product and therefore raw material. If the spinner, instead of spinning, were working in
-a coal mine, the subject of his labour, the coal, would be supplied by Nature; nevertheless, a
-definite quantity of extracted coal, a hundredweight for example, would represent a definite
-quantity of absorbed labour.
-We assumed, on the occasion of its sale, that the value of a day’s labour-power is three shillings,
-and that six hours’ labour is incorporated in that sum; and consequently that this amount of labour
-is requisite to produce the necessaries of life daily required on an average by the labourer. If now
-our spinner by working for one hour, can convert 1 2/3 lbs. of cotton into 1 2/3 lbs. of yarn, 12it
-follows that in six hours he will convert 10 lbs. of cotton into 10 lbs. of yarn. Hence, during the
-spinning process, the cotton absorbs six hours’ labour. The same quantity of labour is also
-embodied in a piece of gold of the value of three shillings. Consequently by the mere labour of
-spinning, a value of three shillings is added to the cotton.
-Let us now consider the total value of the product, the 10 lbs. of yarn. Two and a half days’
-labour has been embodied in it, of which two days were contained in the cotton and in the
-substance of the spindle worn away, and half a day was absorbed during the process of spinning.
-This two and a half days’ labour is also represented by a piece of gold of the value of fifteen
-shillings. Hence, fifteen shillings is an adequate price for the 10 lbs. of yarn, or the price of one
-pound is eighteenpence.
-Our capitalist stares in astonishment. The value of the product is exactly equal to the value of the
-capital advanced. The value so advanced has not expanded, no surplus-value has been created,
-and consequently money has not been converted into capital. The price of the yarn is fifteen
-shillings, and fifteen shillings were spent in the open market upon the constituent elements of the
-product, or, what amounts to the same thing, upon the factors of the labour-process; ten shillings
-were paid for the cotton, two shillings for the substance of the spindle worn away, and three
-shillings for the labour-power. The swollen value of the yarn is of no avail, for it is merely the
-sum of the values formerly existing in the cotton, the spindle, and the labour-power: out of such a
-simple addition of existing values, no surplus-value can possibly arise.13 These separate values
-are now all concentrated in one thing; but so they were also in the sum of fifteen shillings, before
-it was split up into three parts, by the purchase of the commodities.
-There is in reality nothing very strange in this result. The value of one pound of yarn being
-eighteenpence, if our capitalist buys 10 lbs. of yarn in the market, he must pay fifteen shillings for
-them. It is clear that, whether a man buys his house ready built, or gets it built for him, in neither
-case will the mode of acquisition increase the amount of money laid out on the house.
-Our capitalist, who is at home in his vulgar economy, exclaims: “Oh! but I advanced my money
-for the express purpose of making more money.” The way to Hell is paved with good intentions,
-and he might just as easily have intended to make money, without producing at all.14 He threatens
-all sorts of things. He won’t be caught napping again. In future he will buy the commodities in the
-135 Chapter 7
-market, instead of manufacturing them himself. But if all his brother capitalists were to do the
-same, where would he find his commodities in the market? And his money he cannot eat. He tries
-persuasion. “Consider my abstinence; I might have played ducks and drakes with the 15 shillings;
-but instead of that I consumed it productively, and made yarn with it.” Very well, and by way of
-reward he is now in possession of good yarn instead of a bad conscience; and as for playing the
-part of a miser, it would never do for him to relapse into such bad ways as that; we have seen
-before to what results such asceticism leads. Besides, where nothing is, the king has lost his
-rights; whatever may be the merit of his abstinence, there is nothing wherewith specially to
-remunerate it, because the value of the product is merely the sum of the values of the
-commodities that were thrown into the process of production. Let him therefore console himself
-with the reflection that virtue is its own reward. But no, he becomes importunate. He says: “The
-yarn is of no use to me: I produced it for sale.” In that case let him sell it, or, still better, let him
-for the future produce only things for satisfying his personal wants, a remedy that his physician
-MacCulloch has already prescribed as infallible against an epidemic of over-production. He now
-gets obstinate. “Can the labourer,” he asks, “merely with his arms and legs, produce commodities
-out of nothing? Did I not supply him with the materials, by means of which, and in which alone,
-his labour could be embodied? And as the greater part of society consists of such ne’er-do-wells,
-have I not rendered society incalculable service by my instruments of production, my cotton and
-my spindle, and not only society, but the labourer also, whom in addition I have provided with the
-necessaries of life? And am I to be allowed nothing in return for all this service?” Well, but has
-not the labourer rendered him the equivalent service of changing his cotton and spindle into yarn?
-Moreover, there is here no question of service.15 A service is nothing more than the useful effect
-of a use-value, be it of a commodity, or be it of labour.16 But here we are dealing with exchange-
-value. The capitalist paid to the labourer a value of 3 shillings, and the labourer gave him back an
-exact equivalent in the value of 3 shillings, added by him to the cotton: he gave him value for
-value. Our friend, up to this time so purse-proud, suddenly assumes the modest demeanour of his
-own workman, and exclaims: “Have I myself not worked? Have I not performed the labour of
-superintendence and of overlooking the spinner? And does not this labour, too, create value?” His
-overlooker and his manager try to hide their smiles. Meanwhile, after a hearty laugh, he re-
-assumes his usual mien. Though he chanted to us the whole creed of the economists, in reality, he
-says, he would not give a brass farthing for it. He leaves this and all such like subterfuges and
-juggling tricks to the professors of Political Economy, who are paid for it. He himself is a
-practical man; and though he does not always consider what he says outside his business, yet in
-his business he knows what he is about.
-Let us examine the matter more closely. The value of a day’s labour-power amounts to 3
-shillings, because on our assumption half a day’s labour is embodied in that quantity of labour-
-power, i.e., because the means of subsistence that are daily required for the production of labour-
-power, cost half a day’s labour. But the past labour that is embodied in the labour-power, and the
-living labour that it can call into action; the daily cost of maintaining it, and its daily expenditure
-in work, are two totally different things. The former determines the exchange-value of the labour-
-power, the latter is its use-value. The fact that half a day’s labour is necessary to keep the labourer
-alive during 24 hours, does not in any way prevent him from working a whole day. Therefore, the
-value of labour-power, and the value which that labour-power creates in the labour-process, are
-two entirely different magnitudes; and this difference of the two values was what the capitalist
-had in view, when he was purchasing the labour-power. The useful qualities that labour-power
-possesses, and by virtue of which it makes yarn or boots, were to him nothing more than a
-conditio sine qua non; for in order to create value, labour must be expended in a useful manner.
-What really influenced him was the specific use-value which this commodity possesses of being a
-136 Chapter 7
-source not only of value, but of more value than it has itself. This is the special service that the
-capitalist expects from labour-power, and in this transaction he acts in accordance with the
-“eternal laws” of the exchange of commodities. The seller of labour-power, like the seller of any
-other commodity, realises its exchange-value, and parts with its use-value. He cannot take the one
-without giving the other. The use-value of labour-power, or in other words, labour, belongs just
-as little to its seller, as the use-value of oil after it has been sold belongs to the dealer who has
-sold it. The owner of the money has paid the value of a day’s labour-power; his, therefore, is the
-use of it for a day; a day’s labour belongs to him. The circumstance, that on the one hand the
-daily sustenance of labour-power costs only half a day’s labour, while on the other hand the very
-same labour-power can work during a whole day, that consequently the value which its use
-during one day creates, is double what he pays for that use, this circumstance is, without doubt, a
-piece of good luck for the buyer, but by no means an injury to the seller.
-Our capitalist foresaw this state of things, and that was the cause of his laughter. The labourer
-therefore finds, in the workshop, the means of production necessary for working, not only during
-six, but during twelve hours. Just as during the six hours’ process our 10 lbs. of cotton absorbed
-six hours’ labour, and became 10 lbs. of yarn, so now, 20 lbs. of cotton will absorb 12 hours’
-labour and be changed into 20 lbs. of yarn. Let us now examine the product of this prolonged
-process. There is now materialised in this 20 lbs. of yarn the labour of five days, of which four
-days are due to the cotton and the lost steel of the spindle, the remaining day having been
-absorbed by the cotton during the spinning process. Expressed in gold, the labour of five days is
-thirty shillings. This is therefore the price of the 20 lbs. of yarn, giving, as before, eighteenpence
-as the price of a pound. But the sum of the values of the commodities that entered into the process
-amounts to 27 shillings. The value of the yarn is 30 shillings. Therefore the value of the product is
-1/9 greater than the value advanced for its production; 27 shillings have been transformed into 30
-shillings; a surplus-value of 3 shillings has been created. The trick has at last succeeded; money
-has been converted into capital.
-Every condition of the problem is satisfied, while the laws that regulate the exchange of
-commodities, have been in no way violated. Equivalent has been exchanged for equivalent. For
-the capitalist as buyer paid for each commodity, for the cotton, the spindle and the labour-power,
-its full value. He then did what is done by every purchaser of commodities; he consumed their
-use-value. The consumption of the labour-power, which was also the process of producing
-commodities, resulted in 20 lbs. of yarn, having a value of 30 shillings. The capitalist, formerly a
-buyer, now returns to market as a seller, of commodities. He sells his yarn at eighteenpence a
-pound, which is its exact value. Yet for all that he withdraws 3 shillings more from circulation
-than he originally threw into it. This metamorphosis, this conversion of money into capital, takes
-place both within the sphere of circulation and also outside it; within the circulation, because
-conditioned by the purchase of the labour-power in the market; outside the circulation, because
-what is done within it is only a stepping-stone to the production of surplus-value, a process which
-is entirely confined to the sphere of production. Thus “tout est pour le mieux dans le meilleur des
-mondes possibles.” [“Everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.” – Voltaire,
-Candide]
-By turning his money into commodities that serve as the material elements of a new product, and
-as factors in the labour-process, by incorporating living labour with their dead substance, the
-capitalist at the same time converts value, i.e., past, materialised, and dead labour into capital,
-into value big with value, a live monster that is fruitful and multiplies.
-If we now compare the two processes of producing value and of creating surplus-value, we see
-that the latter is nothing but the continuation of the former beyond a definite point. If on the one
-137 Chapter 7
-hand the process be not carried beyond the point, where the value paid by the capitalist for the
-labour-power is replaced by an exact equivalent, it is simply a process of producing value; if, on
-the other hand, it be continued beyond that point, it becomes a process of creating surplus-value.
-If we proceed further, and compare the process of producing value with the labour-process, pure
-and simple, we find that the latter consists of the useful labour, the work, that produces use-
-values. Here we contemplate the labour as producing a particular article; we view it under its
-qualitative aspect alone, with regard to its end and aim. But viewed as a value-creating process,
-the same labour-process presents itself under its quantitative aspect alone. Here it is a question
-merely of the time occupied by the labourer in doing the work; of the period during which the
-labour-power is usefully expended. Here, the commodities that take part in the process, do not
-count any longer as necessary adjuncts of labour-power in the production of a definite, useful
-object. They count merely as depositories of so much absorbed or materialised labour; that
-labour, whether previously embodied in the means of production, or incorporated in them for the
-first time during the process by the action of labour-power, counts in either case only according to
-its duration; it amounts to so many hours or days as the case may be.
-Moreover, only so much of the time spent in the production of any article is counted, as, under
-the given social conditions, is necessary. The consequences of this are various. In the first place,
-it becomes necessary that the labour should be carried on under normal conditions. If a self-acting
-mule is the implement in general use for spinning, it would be absurd to supply the spinner with a
-distaff and spinning wheel. The cotton too must not be such rubbish as to cause extra waste in
-being worked, but must be of suitable quality. Otherwise the spinner would be found to spend
-more time in producing a pound of yarn than is socially necessary, in which case the excess of
-time would create neither value nor money. But whether the material factors of the process are of
-normal quality or not, depends not upon the labourer, but entirely upon the capitalist. Then again,
-the labour-power itself must be of average efficacy. In the trade in which it is being employed, it
-must possess the average skill, handiness and quickness prevalent in that trade, and our capitalist
-took good care to buy labour-power of such normal goodness. This power must be applied with
-the average amount of exertion and with the usual degree of intensity; and the capitalist is as
-careful to see that this is done, as that his workmen are not idle for a single moment. He has
-bought the use of the labour-power for a definite period, and he insists upon his rights. He has no
-intention of being robbed. Lastly, and for this purpose our friend has a penal code of his own, all
-wasteful consumption of raw material or instruments of labour is strictly forbidden, because what
-is so wasted, represents labour superfluously expended, labour that does not count in the product
-or enter into its value.17
-We now see, that the difference between labour, considered on the one hand as producing
-utilities, and on the other hand, as creating value, a difference which we discovered by our
-analysis of a commodity, resolves itself into a distinction between two aspects of the process of
-production.
-The process of production, considered on the one hand as the unity of the labour-process and the
-process of creating value, is production of commodities; considered on the other hand as the unity
-of the labour-process and the process of producing surplus-value, it is the capitalist process of
-production, or capitalist production of commodities.
-We stated, on a previous page, that in the creation of surplus-value it does not in the least matter,
-whether the labour appropriated by the capitalist be simple unskilled labour of average quality or
-more complicated skilled labour. All labour of a higher or more complicated character than
-average labour is expenditure of labour-power of a more costly kind, labour-power whose
-production has cost more time and labour, and which therefore has a higher value, than unskilled
-138 Chapter 7
-or simple labour-power. This power being higher-value, its consumption is labour of a higher
-class, labour that creates in equal times proportionally higher values than unskilled labour does.
-Whatever difference in skill there may be between the labour of a spinner and that of a jeweller,
-the portion of his labour by which the jeweller merely replaces the value of his own labour-
-power, does not in any way differ in quality from the additional portion by which he creates
-surplus-value. In the making of jewellery, just as in spinning, the surplus-value results only from
-a quantitative excess of labour, from a lengthening-out of one and the same labour-process, in the
-one case, of the process of making jewels, in the other of the process of making yarn.18
-But on the other hand, in every process of creating value, the reduction of skilled labour to
-average social labour, e.g., one day of skilled to six days of unskilled labour, is unavoidable.
-19We therefore save ourselves a superfluous operation, and simplify our analysis, by the
-assumption, that the labour of the workman employed by the capitalist is unskilled average
-labour.
-1 “The earth’s spontaneous productions being in small quantity, and quite independent of man, appear,
-as it were, to be furnished by Nature, in the same way as a small sum is given to a young man, in order
-to put him in a way of industry, and of making his fortune.” (James Steuart: “Principles of Polit.
-Econ.” edit. Dublin, 1770, v. I, p.116.)
-2 “Reason is just as cunning as she is powerful. Her cunning consists principally in her mediating
-activity, which, by causing objects to act and re-act on each other in accordance with their own nature,
-in this way, without any direct interference in the process, carries out reason’s intentions.” (Hegel:
-“Enzyklopädie, Erster Theil, Die Logik,” Berlin, 1840, p. 382.)
-3 In his otherwise miserable work (“Théorie de l’Econ. Polit.” Paris, 1815), Ganilh enumerates in a
-striking manner in opposition to the “Physiocrats” the long series of previous processes necessary
-before agriculture properly so called can commence.
-4 Turgot in his “Réflexions sur la Formation et la Distribution des Richesses” (1766) brings well into
-prominence the importance of domesticated animals to early civilisation.
-5 The least important commodities of all for the technological comparison of different epochs of
-production are articles of luxury, in the strict meaning of the term. However little our written histories
-up to this time notice the development of material production, which is the basis of all social life, and
-therefore of all real history, yet prehistoric times have been classified in accordance with the results,
-not of so-called historical, but of materialistic investigations. These periods have been divided, to
-correspond with the materials from which their implements and weapons were made, viz., into the
-stone, the bronze, and the iron ages.
-6 It appears paradoxical to assert, that uncaught fish, for instance, are a means of production in the
-fishing industry. But hitherto no one has discovered the art of catching fish in waters that contain
-none.
-7 This method of determining, from the standpoint of the labour-process alone, what is productive
-labour, is by no means directly applicable to the case of the capitalist process of production.
-8 Storch calls true raw materials “matières,” and accessory material “matériaux.” Cherbuliez describes
-accessories as “matières instrumentales.”
-9 By a wonderful feat of logical acumen, Colonel Torrens has discovered, in this stone of the savage
-the origin of capital. “In the first stone which he [the savage] flings at the wild animal he pursues, in
-the first stick that he seizes to strike down the fruit which hangs above his reach, we see the
-appropriation of one article for the purpose of aiding in the acquisition of another, and thus discover
-the origin of capital.” (R. Torrens: “An Essay on the Production of Wealth,” &c., pp. 70-71.)
-139 Chapter 7
-10 “Products are appropriated before they are converted into capital; this conversion does not secure
-them from such appropriation.” (Cheibuliez: “Richesse ou Pauvreté,” edit. Paris, 1841, p. 54.) “The
-Proletarian, by selling his labour for a definite quantity of the necessaries of life, renounces all claim
-to a share in the product. The mode of appropriation of the products remains the same as before; it is
-in no way altered by the bargain we have mentioned. The product belongs exclusively to the capitalist,
-who supplied the raw material and the necessaries of life; and this is a rigorous consequence of the
-law of appropriation, a law whose fundamental principle was the very opposite, namely, that every
-labourer has an exclusive right to the ownership of what he produces.” (l.c., p. 58.) “When the
-labourers receive wages for their labour ... the capitalist is then the owner not of the capital only” (he
-means the means of production) “but of the labour also. If what is paid as wages is included, as it
-commonly is, in the term capital, it is absurd to talk of labour separately from capital. The word
-capital as thus employed includes labour and capital both.” (James Mill: “Elements of Pol. Econ.,”
-&c., Ed. 1821, pp. 70, 71.)
-11 As has been stated in a previous note, the English language has two different expressions for these
-two different aspects of labour: in the Simple Labour-process, the process of producing Use-Values, it
-is Work; in the process of creation of Value, it is Labour, taking the term in its strictly economic
-sense. — F. E.
-12 These figures are quite arbitrary.
-13 This is the fundamental proposition on which is based the doctrine of the Physiocrats as to the
-unproductiveness of all labour that is not agriculture: it is irrefutable for the orthodox economist.
-“Cette façon d’imputer à une seule chose la valeur de plusieurs autres” (par exemple au lin la
-consommation du tisserand), “d’appliquer, pour ainsi dire, couche sur couche, plusieurs valeurs sur
-une seule, fait que celle-ci grossit d’autant.... Le terme d’addition peint trés bien la maniere dont se
-forme le prix des ouvrages de main d’oeuvre; ce prix n’est qu’un total de plusieurs valeurs
-consommées et additionnées ensemble; or, additionner n’est pas multiplier.” [“This method of adding
-to one particular object the value of a number of others,” (for example, adding the living costs of the
-weaver to the flax), “of as it were heaping up various values in layers on top of one single value, has
-the result that this value grows to the same extent ... The expression ‘addition’ gives a very clear
-picture of the way in which the price of a manufactured product is formed; this price is only the sum
-of a number of values which have been consumed, and it is arrived at by adding them together;
-however, addition is not the same as multiplication.”] (“Mercier de la Rivière,” l.c., p. 599.)
-14 Thus from 1844-47 he withdrew part of his capital from productive employment, in order to throw
-it away in railway speculations; and so also, during the American Civil War, he closed his factory, and
-turned his work-people into the streets, in order to gamble on the Liverpool cotton exchange.
-15 “Extol thyself, put on finery and adorn thyself ... but whoever takes more or better than he gives,
-that is usury, and is not service, but wrong done to his neighbour, as when one steals and robs. All is
-not service and benefit to a neighbour that is called service and benefit. For an adulteress and adulterer
-do one another great service and pleasure. A horseman does an incendiary a great service, by helping
-him to rob on the highway, and pillage land and houses. The papists do ours a great service, in that
-they don’t drown, burn, murder all of them, or let them all rot in prison; but let some live, and only
-drive them out, or take from them what they have. The devil himself does his servants inestimable
-service.... To sum up, the world is full of great, excellent, and daily service and benefit.” (Martin
-Luther: “An die Pfarrherrn wider den Wucher zu predigen,” Wittenberg, 1540.)
-16 In “Zur Kritik der Pol. Oek.,” p. 14, I make the following remark on this point — “It is not difficult
-to understand what ‘service’ the category ‘service’ must render to a class of economists like J. B. Say
-and F. Bastiat.”
-140 Chapter 7
-17 This is one of the circumstances that makes production by slave labour such a costly process. The
-labourer here is, to use a striking expression of the ancients, distinguishable only as instrumentum
-vocale, from an animal as instrumentum semi-vocale, and from an implement as instrumentum
-mutum. But he himself takes care to let both beast and implement feel that he is none of them, but is a
-man. He convinces himself with immense satisfaction, that he is a different being, by treating the one
-unmercifully and damaging the other con amore. Hence the principle, universally applied in this
-method of production, only to employ the rudest and heaviest implements and such as are difficult to
-damage owing to their sheer clumsiness. In the slave-states bordering on the Gulf of Mexico, down to
-the date of the civil war, ploughs constructed on old Chinese models, which turned up the soil like a
-hog or a mole, instead of making furrows, were alone to be found. Conf. J. E. Cairnes. “The Slave
-Power,” London, 1862, p. 46 sqq. In his “Sea Board Slave States,” Olmsted tells us: “I am here shown
-tools that no man in his senses, with us, would allow a labourcr, for whom he was paying wages, to be
-encumbered with; and the excessive weight and clumsiness of which, I would judge, would make
-work at least ten per cent greater than with those ordinarily used with us. And I am assured that, in the
-careless and clumsy way they must be used by the slaves, anything lighter or less rude could not be
-furnished them with good economy, and that such tools as we constantly give our labourers and find
-our profit in giving them, would not last out a day in a Virginia cornfield – much lighter and more free
-from stones though it be than ours. So, too, when I ask why mules are so universally substituted for
-horses on the farm, the first reason given, and confessedly the most conclusive one, is that horses
-cannot bear the treatment that they always must get from negroes; horses are always soon foundered
-or crippled by them, while mules will bear cudgelling, or lose a meal or two now and then, and not be
-materially injured, and they do not take cold or get sick, if neglected or overworked. But I do not need
-to go further than to the window of the room in which I am writing, to see at almost any time,
-treatment of cattle that would ensure the immediate discharge of the driver by almost any farmer
-owning them in the North.”
-18 The distinction between skilled and unskilled labour rests in part on pure illusion, or, to say the
-least, on distinctions that have long since ceased to be real, and that survive only by virtue of a
-traditional convention; in part on the helpless condition of some groups of the working-class, a
-condition that prevents them from exacting equally with the rest the value of their labour-power.
-Accidental circumstances here play so great a part, that these two forms of labour sometimes change
-places. Where, for instance, the physique of the working-class has deteriorated, and is, relatively
-speaking, exhausted, which is the case in all countries with a well developed capitalist production, the
-lower forms of labour, which demand great expenditure of muscle, are in general considered as
-skilled, compared with much more delicate forms of labour; the latter sink down to the level of
-unskilled labour. Take as an example the labour of a bricklayer, which in England occupies a much
-higher level than that of a damask-weaver. Again, although the labour of a fustian cutter demands
-great bodily exertion, and is at the same time unhealthy, yet it counts only as unskilled labour. And
-then, we must not forget, that the so-called skilled labour does not occupy a large space in the field of
-national labour. Laing estimates that in England (and Wales) the livelihood of 11,300,000 people
-depends on unskilled labour. If from the total population of 18,000,000 living at the time when he
-wrote, we deduct 1,000,000 for the “genteel population,” and 1,500,000 for paupers, vagrants,
-criminals, prostitutes, &c., and 4,650,000 who compose the middle-class, there remain the above
-mentioned 11,000,000. But in his middle-class he includes people that live on the interest of small
-investments, officials, men of letters, artists, schoolmasters and the like, and in order to swell the
-number he also includes in these 4,650,000 the better paid portion of the factory operatives! The
-bricklayers, too, figure amongst them. (S. Laing: “National Distress,” &c., London, 1844). “The great
-class who have nothing to give for food but ordinary labour, are the great bulk of the people.” (James
-Mill, in art.: “Colony,” Supplement to the Encyclop. Brit., 1831.)
-141 Chapter 7
-19 “Where reference is made to labour as a measure of value, it necessarily implies labour of one
-particular kind ... the proportion which the other kinds bear to it being easily ascertained.” (“Outlines
-of Pol. Econ.,” Lond., 1832, pp. 22 and 23.)
-Chapter 8: Constant Capital and Variable
-Capital
-The various factors of the labour-process play different parts in forming the value of the product.
-The labourer adds fresh value to the subject of his labour by expending upon it a given amount of
-additional labour, no matter what the specific character and utility of that labour may be. On the
-other hand, the values of the means of production used up in the process are preserved, and
-present themselves afresh as constituent parts of the value of the product; the values of the cotton
-and the spindle, for instance, re-appear again in the value of the yarn. The value of the means of
-production is therefore preserved, by being transferred to the product. This transfer takes place
-during the conversion of those means into a product, or in other words, during the labour-process.
-It is brought about by labour; but how?
-The labourer does not perform two operations at once, one in order to add value to the cotton, the
-other in order to preserve the value of the means of production, or, what amounts to the same
-thing, to transfer to the yarn, to the product, the value of the cotton on which he works, and part
-of the value of the spindle with which he works. But, by the very act of adding new value, he
-preserves their former values. Since, however, the addition of new value to the subject of his
-labour, and the preservation of its former value, are two entirely distinct results, produced
-simultaneously by the labourer, during one operation, it is plain that this two-fold nature of the
-result can be explained only by the two-fold nature of his labour; at one and the same time, it
-must in one character create value, and in another character preserve or transfer value.
-Now, in what manner does every labourer add new labour and consequently new value?
-Evidently, only by labouring productively in a particular way; the spinner by spinning, the weaver
-by weaving, the smith by forging. But, while thus incorporating labour generally, that is value, it
-is by the particular form alone of the labour, by the spinning, the weaving and the forging
-respectively, that the means of production, the cotton and spindle, the yarn and loom, and the iron
-and anvil become constituent elements of the product, of a new use-value.1 Each use-value
-disappears, but only to re-appear under a new form in a new use-value. Now, we saw, when we
-were considering the process of creating value, that, if a use-value be effectively consumed in the
-production of a new use-value, the quantity of labour expended in the production of the consumed
-article, forms a portion of the quantity of labour necessary to produce the new use-value; this
-portion is therefore labour transferred from the means of production to the new product. Hence,
-the labourer preserves the values of the consumed means of production, or transfers them as
-portions of its value to the product, not by virtue of his additional labour, abstractedly considered,
-but by virtue of the particular useful character of that labour, by virtue of its special productive
-form. In so far then as labour is such specific productive activity, in so far as it is spinning,
-weaving, or forging, it raises, by mere contact, the means of production from the dead, makes
-them living factors of the labour-process, and combines with them to form the new products.
-If the special productive labour of the workman were not spinning, he could not convert the
-cotton into yarn, and therefore could not transfer the values of the cotton and spindle to the yarn.
-Suppose the same workman were to change his occupation to that of a joiner, he would still by a
-day’s labour add value to the material he works upon. Consequently, we see, first, that the
-addition of new value takes place not by virtue of his labour being spinning in particular, or
-joinering in particular, but because it is labour in the abstract, a portion of the total labour of
-society; and we see next, that the value added is of a given definite amount, not because his
-143 Chapter 8
-labour has a special utility, but because it is exerted for a definite time. On the one hand, then, it
-is by virtue of its general character, as being expenditure of human labour-power in the abstract,
-that spinning adds new value to the values of the cotton and the spindle; and on the other hand, it
-is by virtue of its special character, as being a concrete, useful process, that the same labour of
-spinning both transfers the values of the means of production to the product, and preserves them
-in the product. Hence at one and the same time there is produced a two-fold result.
-By the simple addition of a certain quantity of labour, new value is added, and by the quality of
-this added labour, the original values of the means of production are preserved in the product.
-This two-fold effect, resulting from the two-fold character of labour, may be traced in various
-phenomena.
-Let us assume, that some invention enables the spinner to spin as much cotton in 6 hours as he
-was able to spin before in 36 hours. His labour is now six times as effective as it was, for the
-purposes of useful production. The product of 6 hours’ work has increased six-fold, from 6 lbs. to
-36 lbs. But now the 36 lbs. of cotton absorb only the same amount of labour as formerly did the 6
-lbs. One-sixth as much new labour is absorbed by each pound of cotton, and consequently, the
-value added by the labour to each pound is only one-sixth of what it formerly was. On the other
-hand, in the product, in the 36 lbs. of yarn, the value transferred from the cotton is six times as
-great as before. By the 6 hours’ spinning, the value of the raw material preserved and transferred
-to the product is six times as great as before, although the new value added by the labour of the
-spinner to each pound of the very same raw material is one-sixth what it was formerly. This
-shows that the two properties of labour, by virtue of which it is enabled in one case to preserve
-value, and in the other to create value, are essentially different. On the one hand, the longer the
-time necessary to spin a given weight of cotton into yarn, the greater is the new value added to the
-material; on the other hand, the greater the weight of the cotton spun in a given time, the greater
-is the value preserved, by being transferred from it to the product.
-Let us now assume, that the productiveness of the spinner’s labour, instead of varying, remains
-constant, that he therefore requires the same time as he formerly did, to convert one pound of
-cotton into yarn, but that the exchange-value of the cotton varies, either by rising to six times its
-former value or falling to one-sixth of that value. In both these cases, the spinner puts the same
-quantity of labour into a pound of cotton, and therefore adds as much value, as he did before the
-change in the value: he also produces a given weight of yarn in the same time as he did before.
-Nevertheless, the value that he transfers from the cotton to the yarn is either one-sixth of what it
-was before the variation, or, as the case may be, six times as much as before. The same result
-occurs when the value of the instruments of labour rises or falls, while their useful efficacy in the
-process remains unaltered.
-Again, if the technical conditions of the spinning process remain unchanged, and no change of
-value takes place in the means of production, the spinner continues to consume in equal working-
-times equal quantities of raw material, and equal quantities of machinery of unvarying value. The
-value that he preserves in the product is directly proportional to the new value that he adds to the
-product. In two weeks he incorporates twice as much labour, and therefore twice as much value,
-as in one week, and during the same time he consumes twice as much material, and wears out
-twice as much machinery, of double the value in each case: he therefore preserves, in the product
-of two weeks, twice as much value as in the product of one week. So long as the conditions of
-production remain the same, the more value the labourer adds by fresh labour, the more value he
-transfers and preserves; but he does so merely because this addition of new value takes place
-under conditions that have not varied and are independent of his own labour. Of course, it may be
-said in one sense, that the labourer preserves old value always in proportion to the quantity of
-144 Chapter 8
-new value that he adds. Whether the value of cotton rise from one shilling to two shillings, or fall
-to sixpence, the workman invariably preserves in the product of one hour only one half as much
-value as he preserves in two hours. In like manner, if the productiveness of his own labour varies
-by rising or falling, he will in one hour spin either more or less cotton, as the case may be, than he
-did before, and will consequently preserve in the product of one hour, more or less value of
-cotton; but, all the same, he will preserve by two hours’ labour twice as much value as he will by
-one.
-Value exists only in articles of utility, in objects: we leave out of consideration its purely
-symbolical representation by tokens. (Man himself, viewed as the impersonation of labour-power,
-is a natural object, a thing, although a living conscious thing, and labour is the manifestation of
-this power residing in him.) If therefore an article loses its utility, it also loses its value. The
-reason why means of production do not lose their value, at the same time that they lose their use-
-value, is this: they lose in the labour-process the original form of their use-value, only to assume
-in the product the form of a new use-value. But, however important it may be to value, that it
-should have some object of utility to embody itself in, yet it is a matter of complete indifference
-what particular object serves this purpose; this we saw when treating of the metamorphosis of
-commodities. Hence it follows that in the labour-process the means of production transfer their
-value to the product only so far as along with their use-value they lose also their exchange-value.
-They give up to the product that value alone which they themselves lose as means of production.
-But in this respect the material factors of the labour-process do not all behave alike.
-The coal burnt under the boiler vanishes without leaving a trace; so, too, the tallow with which
-the axles of wheels are greased. Dye stuffs and other auxiliary substances also vanish but re-
-appear as properties of the product. Raw material forms the substance of the product, but only
-after it has changed its form. Hence raw material and auxiliary substances lose the characteristic
-form with which they are clothed on entering the labour-process. It is otherwise with the
-instruments of labour. Tools, machines, workshops, and vessels, are of use in the labour-process,
-only so long as they retain their original shape, and are ready each morning to renew the process
-with their shape unchanged. And just as during their lifetime, that is to say, during the continued
-labour-process in which they serve, they retain their shape independent of the product, so, too,
-they do after their death. The corpses of machines, tools, workshops, &c., are always separate and
-distinct from the product they helped to turn out. If we now consider the case of any instrument of
-labour during the whole period of its service, from the day of its entry into the workshop, till the
-day of its banishment into the lumber room, we find that during this period its use-value has been
-completely consumed, and therefore its exchange-value completely transferred to the product. For
-instance, if a spinning machine lasts for 10 years, it is plain that during that working period its
-total value is gradually transferred to the product of the 10 years. The lifetime of an instrument of
-labour, therefore, is spent in the repetition of a greater or less number of similar operations. Its
-life may be compared with that of a human being. Every day brings a man 24 hours nearer to his
-grave: but how many days he has still to travel on that road, no man can tell accurately by merely
-looking at him. This difficulty, however, does not prevent life insurance offices from drawing, by
-means of the theory of averages, very accurate, and at the same time very profitable conclusions.
-So it is with the instruments of labour. It is known by experience how long on the average a
-machine of a particular kind will last. Suppose its use-value in the labour-process to last only six
-days. Then, on the average, it loses each day one-sixth of its use-value, and therefore parts with
-one-sixth of its value to the daily product. The wear and tear of all instruments, their daily loss of
-use-value, and the corresponding quantity of value they part with to the product, are accordingly
-calculated upon this basis.
-145 Chapter 8
-It is thus strikingly clear, that means of production never transfer more value to the product than
-they themselves lose during the labour-process by the destruction of their own use-value. If such
-an instrument has no value to lose, if, in other words, it is not the product of human labour, it
-transfers no value to the product. It helps to create use-value without contributing to the formation
-of exchange-value. In this class are included all means of production supplied by Nature without
-human assistance, such as land, wind, water, metals in situ, and timber in virgin forests.
-Yet another interesting phenomenon here presents itself. Suppose a machine to be worth £1,000,
-and to wear out in 1,000 days. Then one thousandth part of the value of the machine is daily
-transferred to the day’s product. At the same time, though with diminishing vitality, the machine
-as a whole continues to take part in the labour-process. Thus it appears, that one factor of the
-labour-process, a means of production, continually enters as a whole into that process, while it
-enters into the process of the formation of value by fractions only. The difference between the
-two processes is here reflected in their material factors, by the same instrument of production
-taking part as a whole in the labour-process, while at the same time as an element in the
-formation of value, it enters only by fractions.2
-On the other hand, a means of production may take part as a whole in the formation of value,
-while into the labour-process it enters only bit by bit. Suppose that in spinning cotton, the waste
-for every 115 lbs. used amounts to 15 lbs., which is converted, not into yarn, but into “devil’s
-dust.” Now, although this 15 lbs. of cotton never becomes a constituent element of the yarn, yet
-assuming this amount of waste to be normal and inevitable under average conditions of spinning,
-its value is just as surely transferred to the value of the yarn, as is the value of the 100 lbs. that
-form the substance of the yarn. The use-value of 15 lbs. of cotton must vanish into dust, before
-100 lbs. of yarn can be made. The destruction of this cotton is therefore a necessary condition in
-the production of the yarn. And because it is a necessary condition, and for no other reason, the
-value of that cotton is transferred to the product. The same holds good for every kind of refuse
-resulting from a labour-process, so far at least as such refuse cannot be further employed as a
-means in the production of new and independent use-values. Such an employment of refuse may
-be seen in the large machine works at Manchester, where mountains of iron turnings are carted
-away to the foundry in the evening, in order the next morning to re-appear in the workshops as
-solid masses of iron.
-We have seen that the means of production transfer value to the new product, so far only as
-during the labour-process they lose value in the shape of their old use-value. The maximum loss
-of value that they can suffer in the process, is plainly limited by the amount of the original value
-with which they came into the process, or in other words, by the labour-time necessary for their
-production. Therefore, the means of production can never add more value to the product than they
-themselves possess independently of the process in which they assist. However useful a given
-kind of raw material, or a machine, or other means of production may be, though it may cost
-£150, or, say, 500 days’ labour, yet it cannot, under any circumstances, add to the value of the
-product more than £150. Its value is determined not by the labour-process into which it enters as a
-means of production, but by that out of which it has issued as a product. In the labour-process it
-only serves as a mere use-value, a thing with useful properties, and could not, therefore, transfer
-any value to the product, unless it possessed such value previously.3
-While productive labour is changing the means of production into constituent elements of a new
-product, their value undergoes a metempsychosis. It deserts the consumed body, to occupy the
-newly created one. But this transmigration takes place, as it were, behind the back of the labourer.
-He is unable to add new labour, to create new value, without at the same time preserving old
-values, and this, because the labour he adds must be of a specific useful kind; and he cannot do
-146 Chapter 8
-work of a useful kind, without employing products as the means of production of a new product,
-and thereby transferring their value to the new product. The property therefore which labour-
-power in action, living labour, possesses of preserving value, at the same time that it adds it, is a
-gift of Nature which costs the labourer nothing, but which is very advantageous to the capitalist
-inasmuch as it preserves the existing value of his capital.4 So long as trade is good, the capitalist
-is too much absorbed in money-grubbing to take notice of this gratuitous gift of labour. A violent
-interruption of the labour-process by a crisis, makes him sensitively aware of it.5
-As regards the means of production, what is really consumed is their use-value, and the
-consumption of this use-value by labour results in the product. There is no consumption of their
-value, 6and it would therefore be inaccurate to say that it is reproduced. It is rather preserved; not
-by reason of any operation it undergoes itself in the process; but because the article in which it
-originally exists, vanishes, it is true, but vanishes into some other article. Hence, in the value of
-the product, there is a reappearance of the value of the means of production, but there is, strictly
-speaking, no reproduction of that value. That which is produced is a new use-value in which the
-old exchange-value reappears.7
-It is otherwise with the subjective factor of the labour-process, with labour-power in action.
-While the labourer, by virtue of his labour being of a specialised kind that has a special object,
-preserves and transfers to the product the value of the means of production, he at the same time,
-by the mere act of working, creates each instant an additional or new value. Suppose the process
-of production to be stopped just when the workman has produced an equivalent for the value of
-his own labour-power, when, for example, by six hours’ labour, he has added a value of three
-shillings. This value is the surplus, of the total value of the product, over the portion of its value
-that is due to the means of production. It is the only original bit of value formed during this
-process, the only portion of the value of the product created by this process. Of course, we do not
-forget that this new value only replaces the money advanced by the capitalist in the purchase of
-the labour-power, and spent by the labourer on the necessaries of life. With regard to the money
-spent, the new value is merely a reproduction; but, nevertheless, it is an actual, and not, as in the
-case of the value of the means of production, only an apparent, reproduction. The substitution of
-one value for another, is here effected by the creation of new value.
-We know, however, from what has gone before, that the labour-process may continue beyond the
-time necessary to reproduce and incorporate in the product a mere equivalent for the value of the
-labour-power. Instead of the six hours that are sufficient for the latter purpose, the process may
-continue for twelve hours. The action of labour-power, therefore, not only reproduces its own
-value, but produces value over and above it. This surplus-value is the difference between the
-value of the product and the value of the elements consumed in the formation of that product, in
-other words, of the means of production and the labour-power.
-By our explanation of the different parts played by the various factors of the labour-process in the
-formation of the product’s value, we have, in fact, disclosed the characters of the different
-functions allotted to the different elements of capital in the process of expanding its own value.
-The surplus of the total value of the product, over the sum of the values of its constituent factors,
-is the surplus of the expanded capital over the capital originally advanced. The means of
-production on the one hand, labour-power on the other, are merely the different modes of
-existence which the value of the original capital assumed when from being money it was
-transformed into the various factors of the labour-process. That part of capital then, which is
-represented by the means of production, by the raw material, auxiliary material and the
-instruments of labour does not, in the process of production, undergo any quantitative alteration
-of value. I therefore call it the constant part of capital, or, more shortly, constant capital.
-147 Chapter 8
-On the other hand, that part of capital, represented by labour-power, does, in the process of
-production, undergo an alteration of value. It both reproduces the equivalent of its own value, and
-also produces an excess, a surplus-value, which may itself vary, may be more or less according to
-circumstances. This part of capital is continually being transformed from a constant into a
-variable magnitude. I therefore call it the variable part of capital, or, shortly, variable capital. The
-same elements of capital which, from the point of view of the labour-process, present themselves
-respectively as the objective and subjective factors, as means of production and labour-power,
-present themselves, from the point of view of the process of creating surplus-value, as constant
-and variable capital.
-The definition of constant capital given above by no means excludes the possibility of a change of
-value in its elements. Suppose the price of cotton to be one day sixpence a pound, and the next
-day, in consequence of a failure of the cotton crop, a shilling a pound. Each pound of the cotton
-bought at sixpence, and worked up after the rise in value, transfers to the product a value of one
-shilling; and the cotton already spun before the rise, and perhaps circulating in the market as yarn,
-likewise transfers to the product twice its original value. It is plain, however, that these changes
-of value are independent of the increment or surplus-value added to the value of the cotton by the
-spinning itself. If the old cotton had never been spun, it could, after the rise, be resold at a shilling
-a pound instead of at sixpence. Further, the fewer the processes the cotton has gone through, the
-more certain is this result. We therefore find that speculators make it a rule when such sudden
-changes in value occur, to speculate in that material on which the least possible quantity of labour
-has been spent: to speculate, therefore, in yarn rather than in cloth, in cotton itself, rather than in
-yarn. The change of value in the case we have been considering, originates, not in the process in
-which the cotton plays the part of a means of production, and in which it therefore functions as
-constant capital, but in the process in which the cotton itself is produced. The value of a
-commodity, it is true, is determined by the quantity of labour contained in it, but this quantity is
-itself limited by social conditions. If the time socially necessary for the production of any
-commodity alters – and a given weight of cotton represents, after a bad harvest, more labour than
-after a good one – all previously existing commodities of the same class are affected, because
-they are, as it were, only individuals of the species,8 and their value at any given time is measured
-by the labour socially necessary, i.e., by the labour necessary for their production under the then
-existing social conditions.
-As the value of the raw material may change, so, too, may that of the instruments of labour, of the
-machinery, &c., employed in the process; and consequently that portion of the value of the
-product transferred to it from them, may also change. If in consequence of a new invention,
-machinery of a particular kind can be produced by a diminished expenditure of labour, the old
-machinery becomes depreciated more or less, and consequently transfers so much less value to
-the product. But here again, the change in value originates outside the process in which the
-machine is acting as a means of production. Once engaged in this process, the machine cannot
-transfer more value than it possesses apart from the process.
-Just as a change in the value of the means of production, even after they have commenced to take
-a part in the labour-process, does not alter their character as constant capital, so, too, a change in
-the proportion of constant to variable capital does not affect the respective functions of these two
-kinds of capital. The technical conditions of the labour-process may be revolutionised to such an
-extent, that where formerly ten men using ten implements of small value worked up a relatively
-small quantity of raw material, one man may now, with the aid of one expensive machine, work
-up one hundred times as much raw material. In the latter case we have an enormous increase in
-the constant capital, that is represented by the total value of the means of production used, and at
-148 Chapter 8
-the same time a great reduction in the variable capital, invested in labour-power. Such a
-revolution, however, alters only the quantitative relation between the constant and the variable
-capital, or the proportions in which the total capital is split up into its constant and variable
-constituents; it has not in the least degree affected the essential difference between the two.
-1 “Labour gives a new creation for one extinguished.” (“An Essay on the Polit. Econ. of Nations,”
-London, 1821, p. 13.)
-2 The subject of repairs of the implements of labour does not concern us here. A machine that is
-undergoing repair, no longer plays the part of an instrument, but that of a subject of labour. Work is no
-longer done with it, but upon it. It is quite permissible for our purpose to assume, that the labour
-expended on the repairs of instruments is included in the labour necessary for their original
-production. But in the text we deal with that wear and tear, which no doctor can cure, and which little
-by little brings about death, with “that kind of wear which cannot be repaired from time to time, and
-which, in the case of a knife, would ultimately reduce it to a state in which the cutler would say of it, it
-is not worth a new blade.” We have shewn in the text, that a machine takes part in every labour-
-process as an integral machine, but that into the simultaneous process of creating value it enters only
-bit by bit. How great then is the confusion of ideas exhibited in the following extract! “Mr. Ricardo
-says a portion of the labour of the engineer in making [stocking] machines” is contained for example
-in the value of a pair of stockings. “Yet the total labour, that produced each single pair of stockings ...
-includes the whole labour of the engineer, not a portion; for one machine makes many pairs, and none
-of those pairs could have been done without any part of the machine.” “Obs. on Certain Verbal
-Disputes in Pol. Econ., Particularly Relating to Value,” p. 54. The author, an uncommonly self-
-satisfied wiseacre, is right in his confusion and therefore in his contention, to this extent only, that
-neither Ricardo nor any other economist, before or since him, has accurately distinguished the two
-aspects of labour, and still less, therefore, the part played by it under each of these aspects in the
-formation of value.
-3 From this we may judge of the absurdity of J. B. Say, who pretends to account for surplus-value
-(Interest, Profit, Rent), by the “services productifs” which the means of production, soil, instruments,
-and raw material, render in the labour-process by means of their use-values. Mr. Wm. Roscher who
-seldom loses an occasion of registering, in black and white, ingenious apologetic fancies, records the
-following specimen: ‒ “J. B. Say (Traité, t. 1, ch. 4) very truly remarks: the value produced by an oil
-mill, after deduction of all costs, is something new, something quite different from the labour by
-which the oil mill itself was erected.” (l.c., p. 82, note.) Very true, Mr. Professor! the oil produced by
-the oil mill is indeed something very different from the labour expended in constructing the mill! By
-value, Mr. Roscher understands such stuff as “oil,” because oil has value, notwithstanding that
-“Nature” produces petroleum, though relatively “in small quantities,” a fact to which he seems to refer
-in his further observation: “It (Nature) produces scarcely any exchange-value.” Mr. Roscher’s
-“Nature” and the exchange-value it produces are rather like the foolish virgin who admitted indeed
-that she had had a child, but “it was such a little one.” This “savant sérieux” in continuation remarks:
-“Ricardo’s school is in the habit of including capital as accumulated labour under the head of labour.
-This is unskilful work, because, indeed, the owner of capital, after all, does something more than the
-merely creating and preserving of the same: namely, the abstention from the enjoyment of it, for
-which he demands, e.g., interest.” (l.c.) How very “skilful” is this “anatomico-physiological method”
-of Political Economy, which, “indeed,” converts a mere desire “after all” into a source of value.
-4 “Of all the instruments of the farmers’ trade, the labour of man ... is that on which he is most to rely
-for the repayment of his capital. The other two ... the working stock of the cattle and the ... carts,
-ploughs, spades, and so forth, without a given portion of the first, are nothing at all.” (Edmund Burke:
-149 Chapter 8
-“Thoughts and Details on Scarcity, originally presented to the Right Hon. W. Pitt, in the month of
-November 1795,” Edit. London, 1800, p. 10.)
-5 In The Times of 26th November, 1862, a manufacturer, whose mill employed 800 hands, and
-consumed, on the average, 150 bales of East Indian, or 130 bales of American cotton, complains, in
-doleful manner, of the standing expenses of his factory when not working. He estimates them at
-£6,000 a year. Among them are a number of items that do not concern us here, such as rent, rates, and
-taxes, insurance, salaries of the manager, book-keeper, engineer, and others. Then he reckons £150 for
-coal used to heat the mill occasionally, and run the engine now and then. Besides this, he includes the
-wages of the people employed at odd times to keep the machinery in working order. Lastly, he puts
-down £1,200 for depreciation of machinery, because “the weather and the natural principle of decay
-do not suspend their operations because the steam-engine ceases to revolve.” He says, emphatically,
-he does not estimate his depreciation at more than the small sum of £1,200, because his machinery is
-already nearly worn out.
-6 “Productive consumption ... where the consumption of a commodity is a part of the process of
-production. ... In these instances there is no consumption of value.” (S. P. Newman, l.c., p. 296.)
-7 In an American compendium that has gone through, perhaps, 20 editions, this passage occurs: “It
-matters not in what form capital re-appears;” then after a lengthy enumeration of all the possible
-ingredients of production whose value re-appears in the product, the passage concludes thus: “The
-various kinds of food, clothing, and shelter, necessary for the existence and comfort of the human
-being, are also changed. They are consumed from time to time, and their value re-appears in that new
-vigour imparted to his body and mind, forming fresh capital, to be employed again in the work of
-production.” (F. Wayland, l.c., pp. 31, 32.) Without noticing any other oddities, it suffices to observe,
-that what re-appears in the fresh vigour, is not the bread’s price, but its bloodforming substances.
-What, on the other hand, re-appears in the value of that vigour, is not the means of subsistence, but
-their value. The same necessaries of life, at half the price, would form just as much muscle and bone,
-just as much vigour, but not vigour of the same value. This confusion of “value” and “vigour” coupled
-with our author’s pharisaical indefiniteness, mark an attempt, futile for all that, to thrash out an
-explanation of surplus-value from a mere re-appearance of pre-existing values.
-8 “Toutes les productions d’un même genre ne forment proprement qu’une masse, dont le prix se
-détermine en général et sans égard aux circonstances particulières.” (Le Trosne, l.c., p. 893.)
-[“Properly speaking, all products of the same kind form a single mass, and their price is determined in
-general and without regard to particular circumstances.”]
-Chapter 9: The Rate of Surplus-Value
-Section 1: The Degree of Exploitation of Labour-Power
-The surplus-value generated in the process of production by C, the capital advanced, or in other
-words, the self-expansion of the value of the capital C, presents itself for our consideration, in the
-first place, as a surplus, as the amount by which the value of the product exceeds the value of its
-constituent elements.
-The capital C is made up of two components, one, the sum of money c laid out upon the means of
-production, and the other, the sum of money v expended upon the labour-power; c represents the
-portion that has become constant capital, and v the portion that has become variable capital. At
-first then, C = c + v: for example, if £500 is the capital advanced, its components may be such
-that the £500 = £410 const. + £90 var. When the process of production is finished, we get a
-commodity whose value = (c + v) + s, where s is the surplus-value; or taking our former figures,
-the value of this commodity may be (£410 const. + £90 var.) + £90 surpl. The original capital has
-now changed from C to C', from £500 to £590. The difference is s or a surplus-value of £90.
-Since the value of the constituent elements of the product is equal to the value of the advanced
-capital, it is mere tautology to say, that the excess of the value of the product over the value of its
-constituent elements, is equal to the expansion of the capital advanced or to the surplus-value
-produced.
-Nevertheless, we must examine this tautology a little more closely. The two things compared are,
-the value of the product and the value of its constituents consumed in the process of production.
-Now we have seen how that portion of the constant capital which consists of the instruments of
-labour, transfers to the production only a fraction of its value, while the remainder of that value
-continues to reside in those instruments. Since this remainder plays no part in the formation of
-value, we may at present leave it on one side. To introduce it into the calculation would make no
-difference. For instance, taking our former example, c = £410: suppose this sum to consist of
-£312 value of raw material, £44 value of auxiliary material, and £54 value of the machinery worn
-away in the process; and suppose that the total value of the machinery employed is £1,054. Out of
-this latter sum, then, we reckon as advanced for the purpose of turning out the product, the sum of
-£54 alone, which the machinery loses by wear and tear in the process; for this is all it parts with
-to the product. Now if we also reckon the remaining £1,000, which still continues in the
-machinery, as transferred to the product, we ought also to reckon it as part of the value advanced,
-and thus make it appear on both sides of our calculation.1 We should, in this way, get £1,500 on
-one side and £1,590 on the other. The difference of these two sums, or the surplus-value, would
-still be £90. Throughout this Book therefore, by constant capital advanced for the production of
-value, we always mean, unless the context is repugnant thereto, the value of the means of
-production actually consumed in the process, and that value alone.
-This being so, let us return to the formula C = c + v, which we saw was transformed into C' = (c +
-v) + s, C becoming C'. We know that the value of the constant capital is transferred to, and
-merely re-appears in the product. The new value actually created in the process, the value
-produced, or value-product, is therefore not the same as the value of the product; it is not, as it
-would at first sight appear (c + v) + s or £410 const. + £90 var. + £90 surpl.; but v + s or £90 var.
-+ £90 surpl., not £590 but £180. If c = 0, or in other words, if there were branches of industry in
-which the capitalist could dispense with all means of production made by previous labour,
-whether they be raw material, auxiliary material, or instruments of labour, employing only
-151 Chapter 9
-labour-power and materials supplied by Nature, in that case, there would be no constant capital to
-transfer to the product. This component of the value of the product, i.e., the £410 in our example,
-would be eliminated, but the sum of £180, the amount of new value created, or the value
-produced, which contains £90 of surplus-value, would remain just as great as if c represented the
-highest value imaginable. We should have C = (0 + v) = v or C' the expanded capital = v + s and
-therefore C' - C = s as before. On the other hand, if s = 0, or in other words, if the labour-power,
-whose value is advanced in the form of variable capital, were to produce only its equivalent, we
-should have C = c + v or C' the value of the product = (c + v) + 0 or C = C'. The capital advanced
-would, in this case, not have expanded its value.
-From what has gone before, we know that surplus-value is purely the result of a variation in the
-value of v, of that portion of the capital which is transformed into labour-power; consequently, v
-+ s = v + v', or v plus an increment of v. But the fact that it is v alone that varies, and the
-conditions of that variation, are obscured by the circumstance that in consequence of the increase
-in the variable component of the capital, there is also an increase in the sum total of the advanced
-capital. It was originally £500 and becomes £590. Therefore in order that our investigation may
-lead to accurate results, we must make abstraction from that portion of the value of the product, in
-which constant capital alone appears, and consequently must equate the constant capital to zero or
-make c = 0. This is merely an application of a mathematical rule, employed whenever we operate
-with constant and variable magnitudes, related to each other by the symbols of addition and
-subtraction only.
-A further difficulty is caused by the original form of the variable capital. In our example, C' =
-£410 const. + £90 var. + £90 surpl.; but £90 is a given and therefore a constant quantity; hence it
-appears absurd to treat it as variable. But in fact, the term £90 var. is here merely a symbol to
-show that this value undergoes a process. The portion of the capital invested in the purchase of
-labour-power is a definite quantity of materialised labour, a constant value like the value of the
-labour-power purchased. But in the process of production the place of the £90 is taken by the
-labour-power in action, dead labour is replaced by living labour, something stagnant by
-something flowing, a constant by a variable. The result is the reproduction of v plus an increment
-of v. From the point of view then of capitalist production, the whole process appears as the
-spontaneous variation of the originally constant value, which is transformed into labour-power.
-Both the process and its result, appear to be owing to this value. If, therefore, such expressions as
-“£90 variable capital,” or “so much self-expanding value,” appear contradictory, this is only
-because they bring to the surface a contradiction immanent in capitalist production.
-At first sight it appears a strange proceeding, to equate the constant capital to zero. Yet it is what
-we do every day. If, for example, we wish to calculate the amount of England’s profits from the
-cotton industry, we first of all deduct the sums paid for cotton to the United States, India, Egypt
-and other countries; in other words, the value of the capital that merely re-appears in the value of
-the product, is put = 0.
-Of course the ratio of surplus-value not only to that portion of the capital from which it
-immediately springs, and whose change of value it represents, but also to the sum total of the
-capital advanced is economically of very great importance. We shall, therefore, in the third book,
-treat of this ratio exhaustively. In order to enable one portion of a capital to expand its value by
-being converted into labour-power, it is necessary that another portion be converted into means of
-production. In order that variable capital may perform its function, constant capital must be
-advanced in proper proportion, a proportion given by the special technical conditions of each
-labour-process. The circumstance, however, that retorts and other vessels, are necessary to a
-chemical process, does not compel the chemist to notice them in the result of his analysis. If we
-152 Chapter 9
-look at the means of production, in their relation to the creation of value, and to the variation in
-the quantity of value, apart from anything else, they appear simply as the material in which
-labour-power, the value-creator, incorporates itself. Neither the nature, nor the value of this
-material is of any importance. The only requisite is that there be a sufficient supply to absorb the
-labour expended in the process of production. That supply once given, the material may rise or
-fall in value, or even be, as land and the sea, without any value in itself; but this will have no
-influence on the creation of value or on the variation in the quantity of value.2
-In the first place then we equate the constant capital to zero. The capital advanced is consequently
-reduced from c + v to v, and instead of the value of the product (c + v) + s we have now the value
-produced (v + s). Given the new value produced = £180, which sum consequently represents the
-whole labour expended during the process, then subtracting from it £90 the value of the variable
-capital, we have remaining £90, the amount of the surplus-value. This sum of £90 or s expresses
-the absolute quantity of surplus-value produced. The relative quantity produced, or the increase
-per cent of the variable capital, is determined, it is plain, by the ratio of the surplus-value to the
-variable capital, or is expressed by s/v. In our example this ratio is 90/90, which gives an increase
-of 100%. This relative increase in the value of the variable capital, or the relative magnitude of
-the surplus-value, I call, “The rate of surplus-value.” 3
-We have seen that the labourer, during one portion of the labour-process, produces only the value
-of his labour-power, that is, the value of his means of subsistence. Now since his work forms part
-of a system, based on the social division of labour, he does not directly produce the actual
-necessaries which he himself consumes; he produces instead a particular commodity, yarn for
-example, whose value is equal to the value of those necessaries or of the money with which they
-can be bought. The portion of his day’s labour devoted to this purpose, will be greater or less, in
-proportion to the value of the necessaries that he daily requires on an average, or, what amounts
-to the same thing, in proportion to the labour-time required on an average to produce them. If the
-value of those necessaries represent on an average the expenditure of six hours’ labour, the
-workman must on an average work for six hours to produce that value. If instead of working for
-the capitalist, he worked independently on his own account, he would, other things being equal,
-still be obliged to labour for the same number of hours, in order to produce the value of his
-labour-power, and thereby to gain the means of subsistence necessary for his conservation or
-continued reproduction. But as we have seen, during that portion of his day’s labour in which he
-produces the value of his labour-power, say three shillings, he produces only an equivalent for the
-value of his labour-power already advanced4 by the capitalist; the new value created only replaces
-the variable capital advanced. It is owing to this fact, that the production of the new value of three
-shillings takes the semblance of a mere reproduction. That portion of the working day, then,
-during which this reproduction takes place, I call “necessary” labour time, and the labour
-expended during that time I call “necessary” labour.5 Necessary, as regards the labourer, because
-independent of the particular social form of his labour; necessary, as regards capital, and the
-world of capitalists, because on the continued existence of the labourer depends their existence
-also.
-During the second period of the labour-process, that in which his labour is no longer necessary
-labour, the workman, it is true, labours, expends labour-power; but his labour, being no longer
-necessary labour, he creates no value for himself. He creates surplus-value which, for the
-capitalist, has all the charms of a creation out of nothing. This portion of the working day, I name
-surplus labour-time, and to the labour expended during that time, I give the name of surplus
-labour. It is every bit as important, for a correct understanding of surplus-value, to conceive it as a
-mere congelation of surplus labour-time, as nothing but materialised surplus labour, as it is, for a
-153 Chapter 9
-proper comprehension of value, to conceive it as a mere congelation of so many hours of labour,
-as nothing but materialised labour. The essential difference between the various economic forms
-of society, between, for instance, a society based on slave-labour, and one based on wage-labour,
-lies only in the mode in which this surplus labour is in each case extracted from the actual
-producer, the labourer.6
-Since, on the one hand, the values of the variable capital and of the labour-power purchased by
-that capital are equal, and the value of this labour-power determines the necessary portion of the
-working day; and since, on the other hand, the surplus-value is determined by the surplus portion
-of the working day, it follows that surplus-value bears the same ratio to variable capital, that
-surplus labour does to necessary labour, or in other words, the rate of surplus-value, s/v = (surplus
-labour)/(necessary labour). Both ratios, s/v and (surplus labour)/(necessary labour), express the
-same thing in different ways; in the one case by reference to materialised, incorporated labour, in
-the other by reference to living, fluent labour.
-The rate of surplus-value is therefore an exact expression for the degree of exploitation of labour-
-power by capital, or of the labourer by the capitalist.7
-We assumed in our example, that the value of the product = £410 const. + £90 var. + £90 surpl.,
-and that the capital advanced = £500. Since the surplus-value = £90, and the advanced capital =
-£500, we should, according to the usual way of reckoning, get as the rate of surplus-value
-(generally confounded with rate of profits) 18%, a rate so low as possibly to cause a pleasant
-surprise to Mr. Carey and other harmonisers. But in truth, the rate of surplus-value is not equal to
-s/C or s/(c+v), but to s/v: thus it is not 90/500 but 90/90 or 100%, which is more than five times
-the apparent degree of exploitation. Although, in the case we have supposed, we are ignorant of
-the actual length of the working day, and of the duration in days or weeks of the labour-process,
-as also of the number of labourers employed, yet the rate of surplus-value s/v accurately discloses
-to us, by means of its equivalent expression, surplus labour/necessary labour the relation between
-the two parts of the working day. This relation is here one of equality, the rate being 100%.
-Hence, it is plain, the labourer, in our example, works one half of the day for himself, the other
-half for the capitalist.
-The method of calculating the rate of surplus-value is therefore, shortly, as follows. We take the
-total value of the product and put the constant capital which merely re-appears in it, equal to zero.
-What remains, is the only value that has, in the process of producing the commodity, been
-actually created. If the amount of surplus-value be given, we have only to deduct it from this
-remainder, to find the variable capital. And vice versâ, if the latter be given, and we require to
-find the surplus-value. If both be given, we have only to perform the concluding operation, viz.,
-to calculate s/v, the ratio of the surplus-value to the variable capital.
-Though the method is so simple, yet it may not be amiss, by means of a few examples, to exercise
-the reader in the application of the novel principles underlying it.
-First we will take the case of a spinning mill containing 10,000 mule spindles, spinning No. 32
-yarn from American cotton, and producing 1 lb. of yarn weekly per spindle. We assume the waste
-to be 6%: under these circumstances 10,600 lbs. of cotton are consumed weekly, of which 600
-lbs. go to waste. The price of the cotton in April, 1871, was 7¾d. per lb.; the raw material
-therefore costs in round numbers £342. The 10,000 spindles, including preparation-machinery,
-and motive power, cost, we will assume, £1 per spindle, amounting to a total of £10,000. The
-wear and tear we put at 10%, or £1,000 yearly = £20 weekly. The rent of the building we suppose
-to be £300 a year, or £6 a week. Coal consumed (for 100 horse-power indicated, at 4 lbs. of coal
-per horse-power per hour during 60 hours, and inclusive of that consumed in heating the mill), 11
-tons a week at 8s. 6d. a ton, amounts to about £4½ a week: gas, £1 a week, oil, &c., £4½ a week.
-154 Chapter 9
-Total cost of the above auxiliary materials, £10 weekly. Therefore the constant portion of the
-value of the week’s product is £378. Wages amount to £52 a week. The price of the yarn is 12¼d.
-per. lb. which gives for the value of 10,000 lbs. the sum of £510. The surplus-value is therefore in
-this case £510 - £430 = £80. We put the constant part of the value of the product = 0, as it plays
-no part in the creation of value. There remains £132 as the weekly value created, which = £52
-var. + £80 surpl. The rate of surplus-value is therefore 80/52 = 153 11/13%. In a working day of
-10 hours with average labour the result is: necessary labour = 3 31/33 hours, and surplus labour =
-6 2/33.8
-One more example. Jacob gives the following calculation for the year 1815. Owing to the
-previous adjustment of several items it is very imperfect; nevertheless for our purpose it is
-sufficient. In it he assumes the price of wheat to be 8s. a quarter, and the average yield per acre to
-be 22 bushels.
-VALUE PRODUCED PER ACRE
-Seed £1 9s. 0d. Tithes, Rates,
-and taxes,
-£1 1s. 0d.
-Manure £2 10s. 0d. Rent £1 8s. 0d.
-Wages £3 10s. 0d. Farmer’s Profit
-and Interest
-£1 2s. 0d.
-TOTAL £7 9s. 0d. TOTAL £3 11s 0d.
-Assuming that the price of the product is the same as its value, we here find the surplus-value
-distributed under the various heads of profit, interest, rent, &c. We have nothing to do with these
-in detail; we simply add them together, and the sum is a surplus-value of £3 11s. 0d. The sum of
-£3 19s. 0d., paid for seed and manure, is constant capital, and we put it equal to zero. There is left
-the sum of £3 10s. 0d., which is the variable capital advanced: and we see that a new value of £3
-10s. 0d + £3 11s. 0d. has been produced in its place. Therefore s/v = £3 11s. 0d. / £3 10s. 0d.,
-giving a rate of surplus-value of more than 100%. The labourer employs more than one half of his
-working day in producing the surplus-value, which different persons, under different pretexts,
-share amongst themselves.9
-Section 2: The Representation of the Components of the Value
-of the Product by Corresponding Proportional Parts of the
-Product Itself
-Let us now return to the example by which we were shown how the capitalist converts money
-into capital.
-The product of a working day of 12 hours is 20 lbs. of yarn, having a value of 30s. No less than
-8/10ths of this value, or 24s., is due to mere re-appearance in it, of the value of the means of
-production (20 lbs. of cotton, value 20s., and spindle worn away, 4s.): it is therefore constant
-capital. The remaining 2/10ths or 6s. is the new value created during the spinning process: of this
-one half replaces the value of the day’s labour-power, or the variable capital, the remaining half
-constitutes a surplus-value of 3s. The total value then of the 20 lbs. of yarn is made up as follows:
-30s. value of yarn = 24s. const. + 3s. var. + 3s. surpl.
-Since the whole of this value is contained in the 20 lbs. of yarn produced, it follows that the
-various component parts of this value, can be represented as being contained respectively in
-corresponding parts of the product.
-155 Chapter 9
-If the value of 30s. is contained in 20 lbs. of yarn, then 8/10ths of this value, or the 24s. that form
-its constant part, is contained in 8/10ths of the product or in 16 lbs. of yarn. Of the latter 13 1/3
-lbs. represent the value of the raw material, the 20s. worth of cotton spun, and 2 2/3 lbs. represent
-the 4s. worth of spindle, &c., worn away in the process.
-Hence the whole of the cotton used up in spinning the 20 lbs. of yarn, is represented by 13 1/3
-lbs. of yarn. This latter weight of yarn contains, it is true, by weight, no more than 13 1/3 lbs. of
-cotton, worth 13 1/3 shillings; but the 6 2/3 shillings additional value contained in it, are the
-equivalent for the cotton consumed in spinning the remaining 6 2/3 lbs. of yarn. The effect is the
-same as if these 6 2/3 lbs. of yarn contained no cotton at all, and the whole 20 lbs. of cotton were
-concentrated in the 13 1/3 lbs. of yarn. The latter weight, on the other hand, does not contain an
-atom either of the value of the auxiliary materials and implements, or of the value newly created
-in the process.
-In the same way, the 2 2/3 lbs. of yarn, in which the 4s., the remainder of the constant capital, is
-embodied, represents nothing but the value of the auxiliary materials and instruments of labour
-consumed in producing the 20 lbs. of yarn.
-We have, therefore, arrived at this result: although eight-tenths of the product, or 16 lbs. of yarn,
-is, in its character of an article of utility, just as much the fabric of the spinner’s labour, as the
-remainder of the same product, yet when viewed in this connexion, it does not contain, and has
-not absorbed any labour expended during the process of spinning. It is just as if the cotton had
-converted itself into yarn, without help; as if the shape it had assumed was mere trickery and
-deceit: for so soon as our capitalist sells it for 24s., and with the money replaces his means of
-production, it becomes evident that this 16 lbs. of yarn is nothing more than so much cotton and
-spindle-waste in disguise.
-On the other hand, the remaining 2/10ths of the product, or 4 lbs of yarn, represent nothing but
-the new value of 6s., created during the 12 hours’ spinning process. All the value transferred to
-those 4 lbs, from the raw material and instruments of labour consumed, was, so to say, intercepted
-in order to be incorporated in the 16 lbs. first spun. In this case, it is as if the spinner had spun 4
-lbs. of yarn out of air, or, as if he had spun them with the aid of cotton and spindles, that, being
-the spontaneous gift of Nature, transferred no value to the product.
-Of this 4 lbs. of yarn, in which the whole of the value newly created during the process, is
-condensed, one half represents the equivalent for the value of the labour consumed, or the 3s.
-variable capital, the other half represents the 3s. surplus-value.
-Since 12 working-hours of the spinner are embodied in 6s., it follows that in yarn of the value of
-30s., there must be embodied 60 working-hours. And this quantity of labour-time does in fact
-exist in the 20 lbs of yarn; for in 8/10ths or 16 lbs there are materialised the 48 hours of labour
-expended, before the commencement of the spinning process, on the means of production; and in
-the remaining 2/10ths or 4 lbs there are materialised the 12 hours’ work done during the process
-itself.
-On a former page we saw that the value of the yarn is equal to the sum of the new value created
-during the production of that yarn plus the value previously existing in the means of production.
-It has now been shown how the various component parts of the value of the product, parts that
-differ functionally from each other, may be represented by corresponding proportional parts of
-the product itself.
-To split up in this manner the product into different parts, of which one represents only the labour
-previously spent on the means of production, or the constant capital, another, only the necessary
-labour spent during the process of production, or the variable capital, and another and last part,
-156 Chapter 9
-only the surplus labour expended during the same process, or the surplus-value; to do this, is, as
-will be seen later on from its application to complicated and hitherto unsolved problems, no less
-important than it is simple.
-In the preceding investigation we have treated the total product as the final result, ready for use,
-of a working day of 12 hours. We can however follow this total product through all the stages of
-its production; and in this way we shall arrive at the same result as before, if we represent the
-partial products, given off at the different stages, as functionally different parts of the final or total
-product.
-The spinner produces in 12 hours 20 lbs. of yarn, or in 1 hour 1⅔ lbs; consequently he produces
-in 8 hours 13⅔ lbs., or a partial product equal in value to all the cotton that is spun in a whole
-day. In like manner the partial product of the next period of 1 hour and 36 minutes, is 2⅔ lbs. of
-yarn: this represents the value of the instruments of labour that are consumed in 12 hours. In the
-following hour and 12 minutes, the spinner produces 2 lbs. of yarn worth 3 shillings, a value
-equal to the whole value he creates in his 6 hours’ necessary labour. Finally, in the last hour and
-12 minutes he produces another 2 lbs. of yarn, whose value is equal to the surplus-value, created
-by his surplus labour during half a day. This method of calculation serves the English
-manufacturer for every-day use; it shows, he will say, that in the first 8 hours, or ⅔ of the
-working day, he gets back the value of his cotton; and so on for the remaining hours. It is also a
-perfectly correct method: being in fact the first method given above with this difference, that
-instead of being applied to space, in which the different parts of the completed product lie side by
-side, it deals with time, in which those parts are successively produced. But it can also be
-accompanied by very barbarian notions, more especially in the heads of those who are as much
-interested, practically, in the process of making value beget value, as they are in
-misunderstanding that process theoretically. Such people may get the notion into their heads, that
-our spinner, for example, produces or replaces in the first 8 hours of his working day the value of
-the cotton; in the following hour and 36 minutes the value of the instruments of labour worn
-away; in the next hour and 12 minutes the value of the wages; and that he devotes to the
-production of surplus-value for the manufacturer, only that well known “last hour.” In this way
-the poor spinner is made to perform the two-fold miracle not only of producing cotton, spindles,
-steam-engine, coal, oil, &c., at the same time that he spins with them, but also of turning one
-working day into five; for, in the example we are considering, the production of the raw material
-and instruments of labour demands four working days of twelve hours each, and their conversion
-into yarn requires another such day. That the love of lucre induces an easy belief in such miracles,
-and that sycophant doctrinaires are never wanting to prove them, is vouched for by the following
-incident of historical celebrity.
-Section 3: Senior’s “Last Hour”
-One fine morning, in the year 1836, Nassau W. Senior, who may be called the bel-esprit of
-English economists, well known, alike for his economic “science,” and for his beautiful style, was
-summoned from Oxford to Manchester, to learn in the latter place, the Political Economy that he
-taught in the former. The manufacturers elected him as their champion, not only against the
-newly passed Factory Act, but against the still more menacing Ten-hours’ agitation. With their
-usual practical acuteness, they had found out that the learned Professor “wanted a good deal of
-finishing;” it was this discovery that caused them to write for him. On his side the Professor has
-embodied the lecture he received from the Manchester manufacturers, in a pamphlet, entitled:
-“Letters on the Factory Act, as it affects the cotton manufacture.” London, 1837. Here we find,
-amongst others, the following edifying passage:
-157 Chapter 9
-“Under the present law, no mill in which persons under 18 years of age are
-employed, ... can be worked more than 11½ hours a day, that is, 12 hours for 5
-days in the week, and nine on Saturday.
-“Now the following analysis (!) will show that in a mill so worked, the whole net
-profit is derived from the last hour. I will suppose a manufacturer to invest
-£100,000: – £80,000 in his mill and machinery, and £20,000 in raw material and
-wages. The annual return of that mill, supposing the capital to be turned once a
-year, and gross profits to be 15 per cent., ought to be goods worth £115,000.... Of
-this £115,000, each of the twenty-three half-hours of work produces 5-115ths or
-one twenty-third. Of these 23-23rds (constituting the whole £115,000) twenty, that
-is to say £100,000 out of the £115,000, simply replace the capital; – one twenty-
-third (or £5,000 out of the £115,000) makes up for the deterioration of the mill
-and machinery. The remaining 2-23rds, that is, the last two of the twenty-three
-half-hours of every day, produce the net profit of 10 per cent. If, therefore (prices
-remaining the same), the factory could be kept at work thirteen hours instead of
-eleven and a half, with an addition of about £2,600 to the circulating capital, the
-net profit would be more than doubled. On the other hand, if the hours of working
-were reduced by one hour per day (prices remaining the same), the net profit
-would be destroyed – if they were reduced by one hour and a half, even the gross
-profit would be destroyed.”10
-And the Professor calls this an “analysis!” If, giving credence to the out-cries of the
-manufacturers, he believed that the workmen spend the best part of the day in the production, i.e.,
-the reproduction or replacement of the value of the buildings, machinery, cotton, coal, &c., then
-his analysis was superfluous. His answer would simply have been: – Gentlemen! if you work
-your mills for 10 hours instead of 11½, then, other things being equal, the daily consumption of
-cotton, machinery, &c., will decrease in proportion. You gain just as much as you lose. Your
-work-people will in future spend one hour and a half less time in reproducing or replacing the
-capital that has been advanced. – If, on the other hand, he did not believe them without further
-inquiry, but, as being an expert in such matters, deemed an analysis necessary, then he ought, in a
-question that is concerned exclusively with the relations of net profit to the length of the working
-day, before all things to have asked the manufacturers, to be careful not to lump together
-machinery, workshops, raw material, and labour, but to be good enough to place the constant
-capital, invested in buildings, machinery, raw material, &c., on one side of the account, and the
-capital advanced in wages on the other side. If the Professor then found, that in accordance with
-the calculation of the manufacturers, the workman reproduced or replaced his wages in 2 half-
-hours, in that case, he should have continued his analysis thus:
-According to your figures, the workman in the last hour but one produces his wages, and in the
-last hour your surplus-value or net profit. Now, since in equal periods he produces equal values,
-the produce of the last hour but one, must have the same value as that of the last hour. Further, it
-is only while he labours that he produces any value at all, and the amount of his labour is
-measured by his labour-time. This you say, amounts to 11½ hours a day. He employs one portion
-of these 11½ hours, in producing or replacing his wages, and the remaining portion in producing
-your net profit. Beyond this he does absolutely nothing. But since, on your assumption, his
-wages, and the surplus-value he yields, are of equal value, it is clear that he produces his wages in
-5¾ hours, and your net profit in the other 5¾ hours. Again, since the value of the yarn produced
-in 2 hours, is equal to the sum of the values of his wages and of your net profit, the measure of the
-value of this yarn must be 11½ working-hours, of which 5¾ hours measure the value of the yarn
-158 Chapter 9
-produced in the last hour but one, and 5¾, the value of the yarn produced in the last hour. We
-now come to a ticklish point; therefore, attention! The last working-hour but one is, like the first,
-an ordinary working-hour, neither more nor less. How then can the spinner produce in one hour,
-in the shape of yarn, a value that embodies 5¾ hours’ labour? The truth is that he performs no
-such miracle. The use-value produced by him in one hour, is a definite quantity of yarn. The
-value of this yarn is measured by 5¾ working-hours, of which 4¾ were, without any assistance
-from him, previously embodied in the means of production, in the cotton, the machinery, and so
-on; the remaining one hour alone is added by him. Therefore since his wages are produced in 5¾
-hours, and the yarn produced in one hour also contains 5¾ hours’ work, there is no witchcraft in
-the result, that the value created by his 5¾ hours’ spinning, is equal to the value of the product
-spun in one hour. You are altogether on the wrong track, if you think that he loses a single
-moment of his working day, in reproducing or replacing the values of the cotton, the machinery,
-and so on. On the contrary, it is because his labour converts the cotton and spindles into yarn,
-because he spins, that the values of the cotton and spindles go over to the yarn of their own
-accord. This result is owing to the quality of his labour, not to its quantity. It is true, he will in one
-hour transfer to the yarn more value, in the shape of cotton, than he will in half an hour; but that
-is only because in one hour he spins up more cotton than in half an hour. You see then, your
-assertion, that the workman produces, in the last hour but one, the value of his wages, and in the
-last hour your net profit, amounts to no more than this, that in the yarn produced by him in 2
-working-hours, whether they are the 2 first or the 2 last hours of the working day, in that yarn,
-there are incorporated 11½ working-hours, or just a whole day’s work, i.e., two hours of his own
-work and 9½ hours of other people’s. And my assertion that, in the first 5¾ hours, he produces
-his wages, and in the last 5¾ hours your net profit, amounts only to this, that you pay him for the
-former, but not for the latter. In speaking of payment of labour, instead of payment of labour-
-power, I only talk your own slang. Now, gentlemen, if you compare the working-time you pay
-for, with that which you do not pay for, you will find that they are to one another, as half a day is
-to half a day; this gives a rate of 100%, and a very pretty percentage it is. Further, there is not the
-least doubt, that if you make your “hands” toil for 13 hours, instead of 11½, and, as may be
-expected from you, treat the work done in that extra one hour and a half, as pure surplus labour,
-then the latter will be increased from 5¾ hours’ labour to 7¼ hours’ labour, and the rate of
-surplus-value from 100% to 126 2/23%. So that you are altogether too sanguine, in expecting that
-by such an addition of 1½ hours to the working day, the rate will rise from 100% to 200% and
-more, in other words that it will be “more than doubled.” On the other hand ‒ man’s heart is a
-wonderful thing, especially when carried in the purse – you take too pessimist a view, when you
-fear, that with a reduction of the hours of labour from 11½ to 10, the whole of your net profit will
-go to the dogs. Not at all. All other conditions remaining the same, the surplus labour will fall
-from 5¾ hours to 4¾ hours, a period that still gives a very profitable rate of surplus-value,
-namely 82 14/23%. But this dreadful “last hour,” about which you have invented more stories
-than have the millenarians about the day of judgment, is “all bosh.” If it goes, it will cost neither
-you, your net profit, nor the boys and girls whom you employ, their “purity of mind.”11
-Whenever your “last hour” strikes in earnest, think of the Oxford Professor. And now, gentlemen,
-“farewell, and may we meet again in yonder better world, but not before.”
-Senior invented the battle cry of the “last hour” in 1836.12 In the London Economist of the 15th
-April, 1848, the same cry was again raised by James Wilson, an economic mandarin of high
-standing: this time in opposition to the 10 hours’ bill.
-159 Chapter 9
-Section 4: Surplus-Produce
-The portion of the product that represents the surplus-value, (one tenth of the 20 lbs., or 2 lbs. of
-yarn, in the example given in Sec. 2) we call “surplus-produce.” Just as the rate of surplus-value
-is determined by its relation, not to the sum total of the capital, but to its variable part; in like
-manner, the relative quantity of surplus-produce is determined by the ratio that this produce bears,
-not to the remaining part of the total product, but to that part of it in which is incorporated the
-necessary labour. Since the production of surplus-value is the chief end and aim of capitalist
-production, it is clear, that the greatness of a man’s or a nation’s wealth should be measured, not
-by the absolute quantity produced, but by the relative magnitude of the surplus-produce.13
-The sum of the necessary labour and the surplus labour, i.e., of the periods of time during which
-the workman replaces the value of his labour-power, and produces the surplus-value, this sum
-constitutes the actual time during which he works, i.e., the working day.
-1 “If we reckon the value of the fixed capital employed as a part of the advances, we must reckon the
-remaining value of such capital at the end of the year as a part of the annual returns.” (Malthus,
-“Princ. of Pol. Econ.” 2nd. ed., Lond., 1836, p. 269.)
-2 What Lucretius says is self-evident; “nil posse creari de nihilo,” out of nothing, nothing can be
-created. Creation of value is transformation of labour-power into labour. Labour-power itself is energy
-transferred to a human organism by means of nourishing matter.
-3 In the same way that the English use the terms “rate of profit,” “rate of interest.” We shall see, in
-Book III, that the rate of profit is no mystery, so soon as we know the laws of surplus-value. If we
-reverse the process, we cannot comprehend either the one or the other.
-4 Note added in the 3rd German edition. — The author resorts here to the economic language in
-current use. It will be remembered that on p. 182 (present edition, p. 174) it was shown that in reality
-the labourer “advances” to the capitalist and not the capitalist to the labourer. — F. E.
-5 In this work, we have, up to now, employed the term “necessary labour-time,” to designate the time
-necessary under given social conditions for the production of any commodity. Henceforward we use it
-to designate also the time necessary for the production of the particular commodity labour-power. The
-use of one and the same technical term in different senses is inconvenient, but in no science can it be
-altogether avoided. Compare, for instance, the higher with the lower branches of mathematics.
-6 Herr Wilhelm Thucydides Roscher has found a mare’s nest. He has made the important discovery
-that if, on the one hand, the formation of surplus-value, or surplus-produce, and the consequent
-accumulation of capital, is now-a-days due to the thrift of the capitalist, on the other hand, in the
-lowest stages of civilisation it is the strong who compel the weak to economise. (l.c., p. 78.) To
-economise what? Labour? Or superfluous wealth that does not exist? What is it that makes such men
-as Roscher account for the origin of surplus-value, by a mere rechauffé of the more of less plausible
-excuses by the capitalist, for his appropriation of surplus-value? It is, besides their real ignorance,
-their apologetic dread of a scientific analysis of value and surplus-value, and of obtaining a result,
-possibly not altogether palatable to the powers that be.
-7 Although the rate of surplus-value is an exact expression for the degree of exploitation of labour-
-power, it is, in no sense, an expression for the absolute amount of exploitation. For example, if the
-necessary labour = 5 hours and the surplus labour = 5 hours, the degree of exploitation is 100%. The
-amount of exploitation is here measured by 5 hours. If, on the other hand, the necessary labour = 6
-hours and the surplus labour = 6 hours, the degree of exploitation remains, as before, 100%, while the
-actual amount of exploitation has increased 20%, namely from five hours to six.
-160 Chapter 9
-8 The above data, which may be relied upon, were given me by a Manchester spinner. In England the
-horse-power of an engine was formerly calculated from the diameter of its cylinder, now the actual
-horse-power shown by the indicator is taken.
-9 The calculations given in the text are intended merely as illustrations. We have in fact. assumed that
-prices = values. We shall, however, see, in Book III., that even in the case of average prices the
-assumption cannot be made in this very simple manner.
-10 Senior, l.c., pp. 12, 13. We let pass such extraordinary notions as are of no importance for our
-purpose; for instance, the assertion, that manufacturers reckon as part of their profit, gross or net, the
-amount required to make good wear and tear of machinery, or in other words, to replace a part of the
-capital. So, too, we pass over any question as to the accuracy of his figures. Leonard Horner has
-shown in “A Letter to Mr. Senior,” &c., London, 1837, that they are worth no more than so-called
-“Analysis.” Leonard Horner was one of the Factory Inquiry Commissioners in 1833, and Inspector, or
-rather Censor of Factories till 1859. He rendered undying service to the English working-class. He
-carried on a life-long contest, not only with the embittered manufacturers, but also with the Cabinet, to
-whom the number of votes given by the masters in the Lower House, was a matter of far greater
-importance than the number of hours worked by the “hands” in the mills.
-Apart from efforts in principle, Senior’s statement is confused. What he really intended to say was
-this: The manufacturer employs the workman for 11½ hours or for 23 half-hours daily. As the
-working day, so, too, the working year, may be conceived to consist of 11½ hours or 23 half-hours,
-but each multiplied by the number of working days in the year. On this supposition, the 23 half-hours
-yield an annual product of £115,000; one half-hour yields 1/23 × £115,000; 20 half-hours yield 20/23
-× £115,000 = £100,000, i.e., they replace no more than the capital advanced. There remain 3 half-
-hours, which yield 1/23 × £115,000 = £5,000 or the gross profit. Of these 3 half-hours, one yields 1/23
-× £115,000 = £5,000; i.e., it makes up for the wear and tear of the machinery; the remaining 2 half-
-hours, i.e., the last hour, yield 2/23 × £115,000 = £10,000 or the net profit. In the text Senior converts
-the last 2/23 of the product into portions of the working day itself.
-11 If, on the one hand, Senior proved that the net profit of the manufacturer, the existence of he
-English cotton industry, and England’s command of the markets of the world, depend on “the last
-working-hour,” on the other hand, Dr. Andrew Ure showed, that if children and young persons under
-18 years of age, instead of being kept the full 12 hours in the warm and pure moral atmosphere of the
-factory, are turned out an hour sooner into the heartless and frivolous outer world, they will be
-deprived, by idleness and vice, of all hope of salvation for their souls. Since 1848, the factory
-inspectors have never tired of twitting the masters with this “last,” this “fatal hour.” Thus Mr. Hovell
-in his report of the 21st May, 1855: “Had the following ingenious calculation (he quotes Senior) been
-correct, every cotton factory in the United Kingdom would have been working at a loss since the year
-1850.” (Reports of the Insp. of Fact., for the half-year, ending 30th April, 1855, pp. 19, 20.) In the
-year 1848, after the passing of the 10 hours’ bill, the masters of some flax spinning mills, scattered,
-few and far between, over the country on the borders of Dorset and Somerset, foisted a petition against
-the bill on to the shoulders of a few of their work-people. One of the clauses of this petition is as
-follows: “Your petitioners, as parents, conceive that an additional hour of leisure will tend more to
-demoralise the children than otherwise, believing that idleness is the parent of vice.” On this the
-factory report of 31st Oct., 1848, says: The atmosphere of the flax mills, in which the children of these
-virtuous and tender parents work, is so loaded with dust and fibre from the raw material, that it is
-exceptionally unpleasant to stand even 10 minutes in the spinning rooms: for you are unable to do so
-without the most painful sensation, owing to the eyes, the ears, the nostrils, and mouth, being
-immediately filled by the clouds of flax dust from which there is no escape. The labour itself, owing to
-the feverish haste of the machinery, demands unceasing application of skill and movement, under the
-control of a watchfulness that never tires, and it seems somewhat hard, to let parents apply the term
-161 Chapter 9
-“idling” to their own children, who, after allowing for meal-times, are fettered for 10 whole hours to
-such an occupation, in such an atmosphere.... These children work longer than the labourers in the
-neighbouring villages.... Such cruel talk about “idleness and vice” ought to be branded as the purest
-cant, and the most shameless hypocrisy.... That portion of the public, who, about 12 years ago, were
-struck by the assurance with which, under the sanction of high authority, it was publicly and most
-earnestly proclaimed, that the whole net profit of the manufacturer flows from the labour of the last
-hour, and that, therefore, the reduction of the working day by one hour, would destroy his net profit,
-that portion of the public, we say, will hardly believe its own eyes, when it now finds, that the original
-discovery of the virtues of “the last hour” has since been so far improved, as to include morals as well
-as profit; so that, if the duration of the labour of children, is reduced to a full 10 hours, their morals,
-together with the net profits of their employers, will vanish, both being dependent on this last, this
-fatal hour. (See Repts., Insp. of Fact., for 31st Oct., 1848, p. 101.) The same report then gives some
-examples of the morality and virtue of these same pure-minded manufacturers, of the tricks, the
-artifices, the cajoling, the threats, and the falsifications, they made use of, in order, first, to compel a
-few defenceless workmen to sign petitions of such a kind, and then to impose them upon Parliament
-as the petitions of a whole branch of industry, or a whole country. It is highly characteristic of the
-present status of so-called economic science, that neither Senior himself, who, at a later period, to his
-honour be it said, energetically supported the factory legislation, nor his opponents, from first to last,
-have ever been able to explain the false conclusions of the “original discovery.” They appeal to actual
-experience, but the why and wherefore remains a mystery.
-12 Nevertheless, the learned professor was not without some benefit from his journey to Manchester.
-In the “Letters on the Factory Act,” he makes the whole net gains including “profit” and “interests”
-and even “something more,” depend upon a single unpaid hour’s work of the labourer. One year
-previously, in his “Outlines of Political Economy,” written for the instruction of Oxford students and
-cultivated Philistines, he had also “discovered, in opposition to Ricardo’s determination of value by
-labour, that profit is derived from the labour of the capitalist, and interest from his asceticism, in other
-words, from his abstinence.” The dodge was an old one, but the word “abstinence” was new. Herr
-Roscher translates it rightly by “Enthaltung.” Some of his countrymen, the Browns, Jones, and
-Robinsons, of Germany, not so well versed in Latin as he, have, monk-like, rendered it by
-“Entsagung” (renunciation).
-13 “To an individual with a capital of £20,000, whose profits were £2,000 per annum, it would be a
-matter quite indifferent whether his capital would employ a 100 or 1,000 men, whether the commodity
-produced sold for £10,000 or £20,000, provided, in all cases, his profit were not diminished below
-£2,000. Is not the real interest of the nation similar? Provided its net real income, its rent and profits,
-be the same, it is of no importance whether the nation consists of 10 or of 12 millions of inhabitants.”
-(Ric. l.c.,.p. 416.) Long before Ricardo, Arthur Young, a fanatical upholder of surplus-produce, for the
-rest, a rambling, uncritical writer, whose reputation is in the inverse ratio of his merit, says, “Of what
-use, in a modem kingdom, would be a whole province thus divided [in the old Roman manner, by
-small independent peasants], however well cultivated, except for the mere purpose of breeding men,
-which taken singly is a most useless purpose?” (Arthur Young: “Political Arithmetic, &c.” London,
-1774, p. 47.)
-Very curious is “the strong inclination... to represent net wealth as beneficial to the labouring class...
-though it is evidently not on account of being net.” (Th . Hopkins, “On Rent of Land, &c.” London,
-1828, p. 126.)
-Chapter 10: The Working Day
-Section 1: The Limits of the Working Day
-We started with the supposition that labour-power is bought and sold at its value. Its value, like
-that of all other commodities, is determined by the working-time necessary to its production. If
-the production of the average daily means of subsistence of the labourer takes up 6 hours, he must
-work, on the average, 6 hours every day, to produce his daily labour-power, or to reproduce the
-value received as the result of its sale. The necessary part of his working day amounts to 6 hours,
-and is, therefore, caeteris paribus [other things being equal], a given quantity. But with this, the
-extent of the working day itself is not yet given.
-Let us assume that the line A–––B represents the length of the necessary working-time, say 6
-hours. If the labour be prolonged 1, 3, or 6 hours beyond A––B, we have 3 other lines:
-Working day I. Working day II. Working day III.
-A–––B–C. A–––B––C. A–––B–––C.
-representing 3 different working days of 7, 9, and 12 hours. The extension B––C of the line A––B
-represents the length of the surplus labour. As the working day is A––B + B––C or A––C, it
-varies with the variable quantity B––C. Since A––B is constant, the ratio of B––C to A––B can
-always be calculated. In working day I, it is 1/6, in working day II, 3/6, in working day III 6/6 of
-A––B. Since further the ratio (surplus working-time)/(necessary working-time), determines the
-rate of the surplus-value, the latter is given by the ratio of B–-C to A–-B. It amounts in the 3
-different working days respectively to 16 2/3, 50 and 100 per cent. On the other hand, the rate of
-surplus-value alone would not give us the extent of the working day. If this rate, e.g., were 100
-per cent., the working day might be of 8, 10, 12, or more hours. It would indicate that the 2
-constituent parts of the working day, necessary-labour and surplus labour time, were equal in
-extent, but not how long each of these two constituent parts was.
-The working day is thus not a constant, but a variable quantity. One of its parts, certainly, is
-determined by the working-time required for the reproduction of the labour-power of the labourer
-himself. But its total amount varies with the duration of the surplus labour. The working day is,
-therefore, determinable, but is, per se, indeterminate.1
-Although the working day is not a fixed, but a fluent quantity, it can, on the other hand, only vary
-within certain limits. The minimum limit is, however, not determinable; of course, if we make the
-extension line B–-C or the surplus labour = 0, we have a minimum limit, i.e., the part of the day
-which the labourer must necessarily work for his own maintenance. On the basis of capitalist
-production, however, this necessary labour can form a part only of the working day; the working
-day itself can never be reduced to this minimum. On the other hand, the working day has a
-maximum limit. It cannot be prolonged beyond a certain point. This maximum limit is
-conditioned by two things. First, by the physical bounds of labour-power. Within the 24 hours of
-the natural day a man can expend only a definite quantity of his vital force. A horse, in like
-manner, can only work from day to day, 8 hours. During part of the day this force must rest,
-sleep; during another part the man has to satisfy other physical needs, to feed, wash, and clothe
-himself. Besides these purely physical limitations, the extension of the working day encounters
-moral ones. The labourer needs time for satisfying his intellectual and social wants, the extent and
-number of which are conditioned by the general state of social advancement. The variation of the
-working day fluctuates, therefore, within physical and social bounds. But both these limiting
-163 Chapter 10
-conditions are of a very elastic nature, and allow the greatest latitude. So we find working days of
-8, 10, 12, 14, 16, 18 hours, i.e., of the most different lengths.
-The capitalist has bought the labour-power at its day-rate. To him its use-value belongs during
-one working day. He has thus acquired the right to make the labourer work for him during one
-day. But, what is a working day? 2
-At all events, less than a natural day. By how much? The capitalist has his own views of this
-ultima Thule [the outermost limit], the necessary limit of the working day. As capitalist, he is
-only capital personified. His soul is the soul of capital. But capital has one single life impulse, the
-tendency to create value and surplus-value, to make its constant factor, the means of production,
-absorb the greatest possible amount of surplus labour.3
-Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more,
-the more labour it sucks. The time during which the labourer works, is the time during which the
-capitalist consumes the labour-power he has purchased of him.4
-If the labourer consumes his disposable time for himself, he robs the capitalist.5
-The capitalist then takes his stand on the law of the exchange of commodities. He, like all other
-buyers, seeks to get the greatest possible benefit out of the use-value of his commodity. Suddenly
-the voice of the labourer, which had been stifled in the storm and stress of the process of
-production, rises:
-The commodity that I have sold to you differs from the crowd of other commodities, in that its
-use creates value, and a value greater than its own. That is why you bought it. That which on your
-side appears a spontaneous expansion of capital, is on mine extra expenditure of labour-power.
-You and I know on the market only one law, that of the exchange of commodities. And the
-consumption of the commodity belongs not to the seller who parts with it, but to the buyer, who
-acquires it. To you, therefore, belongs the use of my daily labour-power. But by means of the
-price that you pay for it each day, I must be able to reproduce it daily, and to sell it again. Apart
-from natural exhaustion through age, &c., I must be able on the morrow to work with the same
-normal amount of force, health and freshness as to-day. You preach to me constantly the gospel
-of “saving” and “abstinence.” Good! I will, like a sensible saving owner, husband my sole wealth,
-labour-power, and abstain from all foolish waste of it. I will each day spend, set in motion, put
-into action only as much of it as is compatible with its normal duration, and healthy development.
-By an unlimited extension of the working day, you may in one day use up a quantity of labour-
-power greater than I can restore in three. What you gain in labour I lose in substance. The use of
-my labour-power and the spoliation of it are quite different things. If the average time that (doing
-a reasonable amount of work) an average labourer can live, is 30 years, the value of my labour-
-power, which you pay me from day to day is 1/(365×30) or 1/10950 of its total value. But if you
-consume it in 10 years, you pay me daily 1/10950 instead of 1/3650 of its total value, i.e., only
-1/3 of its daily value, and you rob me, therefore, every day of 2/3 of the value of my commodity.
-You pay me for one day’s labour-power, whilst you use that of 3 days. That is against our
-contract and the law of exchanges. I demand, therefore, a working day of normal length, and I
-demand it without any appeal to your heart, for in money matters sentiment is out of place. You
-may be a model citizen, perhaps a member of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to
-Animals, and in the odour of sanctity to boot; but the thing that you represent face to face with me
-has no heart in its breast. That which seems to throb there is my own heart-beating. I demand the
-normal working day because I, like every other seller, demand the value of my commodity. 6
-We see then, that, apart from extremely elastic bounds, the nature of the exchange of
-commodities itself imposes no limit to the working day, no limit to surplus labour. The capitalist
-164 Chapter 10
-maintains his rights as a purchaser when he tries to make the working day as long as possible, and
-to make, whenever possible, two working days out of one. On the other hand, the peculiar nature
-of the commodity sold implies a limit to its consumption by the purchaser, and the labourer
-maintains his right as seller when he wishes to reduce the working day to one of definite normal
-duration. There is here, therefore, an antinomy, right against right, both equally bearing the seal
-of the law of exchanges. Between equal rights force decides. Hence is it that in the history of
-capitalist production, the determination of what is a working day, presents itself as the result of a
-struggle, a struggle between collective capital, i.e., the class of capitalists, and collective labour,
-i.e., the working-class.
-Section 2: The Greed for Surplus-Labour. Manufacturer and
-Boyard
-Capital has not invented surplus labour. Wherever a part of society possesses the monopoly of the
-means of production, the labourer, free or not free, must add to the working-time necessary for
-his own maintenance an extra working-time in order to produce the means of subsistence for the
-owners of the means of production7, whether this proprietor be the Athenian χαλος γαχαθος
-[well-to-do man], Etruscan theocrat, civis Romanus [Roman citizen], Norman baron, American
-slave-owner, Wallachian Boyard, modern landlord or capitalist.8 It is, however, clear that in any
-given economic formation of society, where not the exchange-value but the use-value of the
-product predominates, surplus labour will be limited by a given set of wants which may be
-greater or less, and that here no boundless thirst for surplus labour arises from the nature of the
-production itself. Hence in antiquity over-work becomes horrible only when the object is to
-obtain exchange-value in its specific independent money-form; in the production of gold and
-silver. Compulsory working to death is here the recognised form of over-work. Only read
-Diodorus Siculus.9 Still these are exceptions in antiquity. But as soon as people, whose
-production still moves within the lower forms of slave-labour, corvée-labour, &c., are drawn into
-the whirlpool of an international market dominated by the capitalistic mode of production, the
-sale of their products for export becoming their principal interest, the civilised horrors of over-
-work are grafted on the barbaric horrors of slavery, serfdom, &c. Hence the negro labour in the
-Southern States of the American Union preserved something of a patriarchal character, so long as
-production was chiefly directed to immediate local consumption. But in proportion, as the export
-of cotton became of vital interest to these states, the over-working of the negro and sometimes the
-using up of his life in 7 years of labour became a factor in a calculated and calculating system. It
-was no longer a question of obtaining from him a certain quantity of useful products. It was now
-a question of production of surplus labour itself: So was it also with the corvée, e.g., in the
-Danubian Principalities (now Roumania).
-The comparison of the greed for surplus labour in the Danubian Principalities with the same
-greed in English factories has a special interest, because surplus labour in the corvée has an
-independent and palpable form.
-Suppose the working day consists of 6 hours of necessary labour, and 6 hours of surplus labour.
-Then the free labourer gives the capitalist every week 6 x 6 or 36 hours of surplus labour. It is the
-same as if he worked 3 days in the week for himself, and 3 days in the week gratis for the
-capitalist. But this is not evident on the surface. Surplus labour and necessary labour glide one
-into the other. I can, therefore, express the same relationship by saying, e.g., that the labourer in
-every minute works 30 seconds for himself, and 30 for the capitalist, etc. It is otherwise with the
-corvée. The necessary labour which the Wallachian peasant does for his own maintenance is
-165 Chapter 10
-distinctly marked off from his surplus labour on behalf of the Boyard. The one he does on his
-own field, the other on the seignorial estate. Both parts of the labour-time exist, therefore,
-independently, side by side one with the other. In the corvée the surplus labour is accurately
-marked off from the necessary labour. This, however, can make no difference with regard to the
-quantitative relation of surplus labour to necessary labour. Three days’ surplus labour in the week
-remain three days that yield no equivalent to the labourer himself, whether it be called corvée or
-wage-labour. But in the capitalist the greed for surplus labour appears in the straining after an
-unlimited extension of the working day, in the Boyard more simply in a direct hunting after days
-of corvée.10
-In the Danubian Principalities the corvée was mixed up with rents in kind and other
-appurtenances of bondage, but it formed the most important tribute paid to the ruling class.
-Where this was the case, the corvée rarely arose from serfdom; serfdom much more frequently on
-the other hand took origin from the corvée.11 This is what took place in the Roumanian provinces.
-Their original mode of production was based on community of the soil, but not in the Slavonic or
-Indian form. Part of the land was cultivated in severalty as freehold by the members of the
-community, another part – ager publicus – was cultivated by them in common. The products of
-this common labour served partly as a reserve fund against bad harvests and other accidents,
-partly as a public store for providing the costs of war, religion, and other common expenses. In
-course of time military and clerical dignitaries usurped, along with the common land, the labour
-spent upon it. The labour of the free peasants on their common land was transformed into corvée
-for the thieves of the common land. This corvée soon developed into a servile relationship
-existing in point of fact, not in point of law, until Russia, the liberator of the world, made it legal
-under presence of abolishing serfdom. The code of the corvée, which the Russian General
-Kisseleff proclaimed in 1831, was of course dictated by the Boyards themselves. Thus Russia
-conquered with one blow the magnates of the Danubian provinces, and the applause of liberal
-cretins throughout Europe.
-According to the “Règlement organique,” as this code of the corvée is called, every Wallachian
-peasant owes to the so-called landlord, besides a mass of detailed payments in kind: (1), 12 days
-of general labour; (2), one day of field labour; (3), one day of wood carrying. In all, 14 days in the
-year. With deep insight into Political Economy, however, the working day is not taken in its
-ordinary sense, but as the working day necessary to the production of an average daily product;
-and that average daily product is determined in so crafty a way that no Cyclops would be done
-with it in 24 hours. In dry words, the Réglement itself declares with true Russian irony that by 12
-working days one must understand the product of the manual labour of 36 days, by 1 day of field
-labour 3 days, and by 1 day of wood carrying in like manner three times as much. In all, 42
-corvée days. To this had to be added the so-called jobagie, service due to the lord for
-extraordinary occasions. In proportion to the size of its population, every village has to furnish
-annually a definite contingent to the jobagie. This additional corvée is estimated at 14 days for
-each Wallachian peasant. Thus the prescribed corvée amounts to 56 working days yearly. But the
-agricultural year in Wallachia numbers in consequence of the severe climate only 210 days, of
-which 40 for Sundays and holidays, 30 on an average for bad weather, together 70 days, do not
-count. 140 working days remain. The ratio of the corvée to the necessary labour 56/84 or 66 2/3
-% gives a much smaller rate of surplus-value than that which regulates the labour of the English
-agricultural or factory labourer. This is, however, only the legally prescribed corvée. And in a
-spirit yet more “liberal” than the English Factory Acts, the “Règlement organique” has known
-how to facilitate its own evasion. After it has made 56 days out of 12, the nominal day’s work of
-each of the 56 corvée days is again so arranged that a portion of it must fall on the ensuing day. In
-166 Chapter 10
-one day, e.g., must be weeded an extent of land, which, for this work, especially in maize
-plantations, needs twice as much time. The legal day’s work for some kinds of agricultural labour
-is interpretable in such a way that the day begins in May and ends in October. In Moldavia
-conditions are still harder.
-“The 12 corvée days of the ‘Règlement organique’ cried a Boyard drunk with victory, amount to
-365 days in the year.”12
-If the Règlement organique of the Danubian provinces was a positive expression of the greed for
-surplus labour which every paragraph legalised, the English Factory Acts are the negative
-expression of the same greed. These acts curb the passion of capital for a limitless draining of
-labour-power, by forcibly limiting the working day by state regulations, made by a state that is
-ruled by capitalist-and landlord. Apart from the working-class movement that daily grew more
-threatening, the limiting of factory labour was dictated by the same necessity which spread guano
-over the English fields. The same blind eagerness for plunder that in the one case exhausted the
-soil, had, in the other, torn up by the roots the living force of the nation. Periodical epidemics
-speak on this point as clearly as the diminishing military standard in Germany and France.13
-The Factory Act of 1850 now in force (1867) allows for the average working day 10 hours, i.e.,
-for the first 5 days 12 hours from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., including ½ an hour for breakfast, and an hour
-for dinner, and thus leaving 10½ working-hours, and 8 hours for Saturday, from 6 a.m. to 2 p.m.,
-of which ½ an hour is subtracted for breakfast. 60 working-hours are left, 10½ for each of the first
-5 days, 7½ for the last.14
-Certain guardians of these laws are appointed, Factory Inspectors, directly under the Home
-Secretary, whose reports are published half-yearly, by order of Parliament. They give regular and
-official statistics of the capitalistic greed for surplus labour.
-Let us listen, for a moment, to the Factory Inspectors.15
-“The fraudulent mill-owner begins work a quarter of an hour (sometimes more,
-sometimes less) before 6 a.m., and leaves off a quarter of an hour (sometimes
-more, sometimes less) after 6 p.m. He takes 5 minutes from the beginning and
-from the end of the half hour nominally allowed for breakfast, and 10 minutes at
-the beginning and end of the hour nominally allowed for dinner. He works for a
-quarter of an hour (sometimes more, sometimes less) after 2 p.m. on Saturday.
-Thus his gain is –
-Before 6 a.m., 15 minutes.
-After 6 p.m., 15 "
-At breakfast time, 10 "
-At dinner time, 20 "
-Five days – 300 minutes, 60 "
-On Saturday before 6 a.m., 15 minutes.
-At breakfast time, 10 "
-After 2 p.m., 15 "
-40 minutes.
-Total weekly, 340 minutes.
-Or 5 hours and 40 minutes weekly, which multiplied by 50 working weeks in the
-year (allowing two for holidays and occasional stoppages) is equal to 27 working
-days.”16
-167 Chapter 10
-“Five minutes a day’s increased work, multiplied by weeks, are equal to two and a
-half days of produce in the year.”17
-“An additional hour a day gained by small instalments before 6 a.m., after 6 p.m.,
-and at the beginning and end of the times nominally fixed for meals, is nearly
-equivalent to working 13 months in the year.”18
-Crises during which production is interrupted and the factories work “short time,” i.e., for only a
-part of the week, naturally do not affect the tendency to extend the working day. The less
-business there is, the more profit has to be made on the business done. The less time spent in
-work, the more of that time has to be turned into surplus labour-time.
-Thus the Factory Inspector’s report on the period of the crisis from 1857 to 1858:
-“It may seem inconsistent that there should be any overworking at a time when
-trade is so bad; but that very badness leads to the transgression by unscrupulous
-men, they get the extra profit of it. ... In the last half year, says Leonard Horner,
-122 mills in my district have been given up; 143 were found standing,” yet, over-
-work is continued beyond the legal hours.”19
-“For a great part of the time,” says Mr. Howell, “owing to the depression of trade,
-many factories were altogether closed, and a still greater number were working
-short time. I continue, however, to receive about the usual number of complaints
-that half, or three-quarters of an hour in the day, are snatched from the workers by
-encroaching upon the times professedly allowed for rest and refreshment.” 20
-The same phenomenon was reproduced on a smaller scale during the frightful cotton-crises from
-1861 to 1865.21
-“It is sometimes advanced by way of excuse, when persons are found at work in a
-factory, either at a meal hour, or at some illegal time, that they will not leave the
-mill at the appointed hour, and that compulsion is necessary to force them to cease
-work [cleaning their machinery, &c.], especially on Saturday afternoons. But, if
-the hands remain in a factory after the machinery has ceased to revolve ... they
-would not have been so employed if sufficient time had been set apart specially
-for cleaning, &c., either before 6 a.m. [sic.!] or before 2 p.m. on Saturday
-afternoons.” 22
-“The profit to be gained by it (over-working in violation of the Act) appears to be,
-to many, a greater temptation than they can resist; they calculate upon the chance
-of not being found out; and when they see the small amount of penalty and costs,
-which those who have been convicted have had to pay, they find that if they
-should be detected there will still be a considerable balance of gain.... 23 In cases
-where the additional time is gained by a multiplication of small thefts in the
-course of the day, there are insuperable difficulties to the inspectors making out a
-case.” 24
-These “small thefts” of capital from the labourer’s meal and recreation time, the factory
-inspectors also designate as “petty pilferings of minutes,” 25“snatching a few minutes,”26 or, as
-the labourers technically called them, “nibbling and cribbling at meal-times.” 27
-It is evident that in this atmosphere the formation of surplus-value by surplus labour, is no secret.
-“If you allow me,” said a highly respectable master to me, “to work only ten
-minutes in the day over-time, you put one thousand a year in my pocket.”28
-“Moments are the elements of profit.”29
-168 Chapter 10
-Nothing is from this point of view more characteristic than the designation of the workers who
-work full time as “full-timers,” and the children under 13 who are only allowed to work 6 hours
-as “half-timers.” The worker is here nothing more than personified labour-time. All individual
-distinctions are merged in those of “full-timers” and “half-timers” 30
-Section 3: Branches of English Industry Without Legal Limits
-to Exploitation
-We have hitherto considered the tendency to the extension of the working day, the were-wolf’s
-hunger for surplus labour in a department where the monstrous exactions, not surpassed, says an
-English bourgeois economist, by the cruelties of the Spaniards to the American red-skins31,
-caused capital at last to be bound by the chains of legal regulations. Now, let us cast a glance at
-certain branches of production in which the exploitation of labour is either free from fetters to this
-day, or was so yesterday.
-Mr. Broughton Charlton, county magistrate, declared, as chairman of a meeting
-held at the Assembly Rooms, Nottingham, on the 14th January, 1860, “that there
-was an amount of privation and suffering among that portion of the population
-connected with the lace trade, unknown in other parts of the kingdom, indeed, in
-the civilised world .... Children of nine or ten years are dragged from their squalid
-beds at two, three, or four o’clock in the morning and compelled to work for a
-bare subsistence until ten, eleven, or twelve at night, their limbs wearing away,
-their frames dwindling, their faces whitening, and their humanity absolutely
-sinking into a stone-like torpor, utterly horrible to contemplate.... We are not
-surprised that Mr. Mallett, or any other manufacturer, should stand forward and
-protest against discussion.... The system, as the Rev. Montagu Valpy describes it,
-is one of unmitigated slavery, socially, physically, morally, and spiritually....
-What can be thought of a town which holds a public meeting to petition that the
-period of labour for men shall be diminished to eighteen hours a day? .... We
-declaim against the Virginian and Carolinian cotton-planters. Is their black-
-market, their lash, and their barter of human flesh more detestable than this slow
-sacrifice of humanity which takes place in order that veils and collars may be
-fabricated for the benefit of capitalists?”32
-The potteries of Staffordshire have, during the last 22 years, been the subject of three
-parliamentary inquiries. The result is embodied in Mr. Scriven’s Report of 1841 to the
-“Children’s Employment Commissioners,” in the report of Dr. Greenhow of 1860 published by
-order of the medical officer of the Privy Council (Public Health, 3rd Report, 112-113), lastly, in
-the report of Mr. Longe of 1862 in the “First Report of the Children’s Employment Commission,
-of the 13th June, 1863.” For my purpose it is enough to take, from the reports of 1860 and 1863,
-some depositions of the exploited children themselves. From the children we may form an
-opinion as to the adults, especially the girls and women, and that in a branch of industry by the
-side of which cotton-spinning appears an agreeable and healthful occupation. 33
-William Wood, 9 years old, was 7 years and 10 months when he began to work. He “ran moulds”
-(carried ready-moulded articles into the drying-room, afterwards bringing back the empty mould)
-from the beginning. He came to work every day in the week at 6 a.m., and left off about 9 p.m. “I
-work till 9 o’clock at night six days in the week. I have done so seven or eight weeks.”
-Fifteen hours of labour for a child 7 years old! J. Murray, 12 years of age, says: “I
-turn jigger, and run moulds. I come at 6. Sometimes I come at 4. I worked all
-169 Chapter 10
-night last night, till 6 o’clock this morning. I have not been in bed since the night
-before last. There were eight or nine other boys working last night. All but one
-have come this morning. I get 3 shillings and sixpence. I do not get any more for
-working at night. I worked two nights last week.”
-Fernyhough, a boy of ten:
-“I have not always an hour (for dinner). I have only half an hour sometimes; on
-Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.” 34
-Dr. Greenhow states that the average duration of life in the pottery districts of Stoke-on-Trent,
-and Wolstanton is extraordinarily short. Although in the district of Stoke, only 36.6% and in
-Wolstanton only 30.4% of the adult male population above 20 are employed in the potteries,
-among the men of that age in the first district more than half, in the second, nearly 2/5 of the
-whole deaths are the result of pulmonary diseases among the potters. Dr. Boothroyd, a medical
-practitioner at Hanley, says:
-“Each successive generation of potters is more dwarfed and less robust than the preceding one.”
-In like manner another doctor, Mr. M’Bean:
-“Since he began to practice among the potters 25 years ago, he had observed a
-marked degeneration especially shown in diminution of stature and breadth.”
-These statements are taken from the report of Dr. Greenhow in 1860.35
-From the report of the Commissioners in 1863, the following: Dr. J. T. Arledge, senior physician
-of the North Staffordshire Infirmary, says:
-“The potters as a class, both men and women, represent a degenerated population,
-both physically and morally. They are, as a rule, stunted in growth, ill-shaped, and
-frequently ill-formed in the chest; they become prematurely old, and are certainly
-short-lived; they are phlegmatic and bloodless, and exhibit their debility of
-constitution by obstinate attacks of dyspepsia, and disorders of the liver and
-kidneys, and by rheumatism. But of all diseases they are especially prone to chest-
-disease, to pneumonia, phthisis, bronchitis, and asthma. One form would appear
-peculiar to them, and is known as potter’s asthma, or potter’s consumption.
-Scrofula attacking the glands, or bones, or other parts of the body, is a disease of
-two-thirds or more of the potters .... That the ‘degenerescence’ of the population
-of this district is not even greater than it is, is due to the constant recruiting from
-the adjacent country, and intermarriages with more healthy races.”36
-Mr. Charles Parsons, late house surgeon of the same institution, writes in a letter to
-Commissioner Longe, amongst other things:
-“I can only speak from personal observation and not from statistical data, but I do
-not hesitate to assert that my indignation has been aroused again and again at the
-sight of poor children whose health has been sacrificed to gratify the avarice of
-either parents or employers.” He enumerates the causes of the diseases of the
-potters, and sums them up in the phrase, “long hours.” The report of the
-Commission trusts that “a manufacture which has assumed so prominent a place
-in the whole world, will not long be subject to the remark that its great success is
-accompanied with the physical deterioration, widespread bodily suffering, and
-early death of the workpeople ... by whose labour and skill such great results have
-been achieved.” 37
-And all that holds of the potteries in England is true of those in Scotland.38
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-The manufacture of lucifer matches dates from 1833, from the discovery of the method of
-applying phosphorus to the match itself. Since 1845 this manufacture has rapidly developed in
-England, and has extended especially amongst the thickly populated parts of London as well as in
-Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool, Bristol, Norwich, Newcastle and Glasgow. With it has
-spread the form of lockjaw, which a Vienna physician in 1845 discovered to be a disease peculiar
-to lucifer-matchmakers. Half the workers are children under thirteen, and young persons under
-eighteen. The manufacture is on account of its unhealthiness and unpleasantness in such bad
-odour that only the most miserable part of the labouring class, half-starved widows and so forth,
-deliver up their children to it, “the ragged, half-starved, untaught children.”39
-Of the witnesses that Commissioner White examined (1863), 270 were under 18, 50 under 10, 10
-only 8, and 5 only 6 years old. A range of the working day from 12 to 14 or 15 hours, night-
-labour, irregular meal-times, meals for the most part taken in the very workrooms that are
-pestilent with phosphorus. Dante would have found the worst horrors of his Inferno surpassed in
-this manufacture.
-In the manufacture of paper-hangings the coarser sorts are printed by machine; the finer by hand
-(block-printing). The most active business months are from the beginning of October to the end
-of April. During this time the work goes on fast and furious without intermission from 6 a.m. to
-10 p.m. or further into the night.
-J. Leach deposes:
-“Last winter six out of nineteen girls were away from ill-health at one time from
-over-work. I have to bawl at them to keep them awake.” W. Duffy: “I have seen
-when the children could none of them keep their eyes open for the work; indeed,
-none of us could.” J. Lightbourne: “Am 13 ... We worked last winter till 9
-(evening), and the winter before till 10. I used to cry with sore feet every night last
-winter.” G. Apsden: “That boy of mine when he was 7 years old I used to carry
-him on my back to and fro through the snow, and he used to have 16 hours a day
-... I have often knelt down to feed him as he stood by the machine, for he could
-not leave it or stop.” Smith, the managing partner of a Manchester factory: “We
-(he means his “hands” who work for “us”) work on with no stoppage for meals, so
-that day’s work of 10½ hours is finished by 4.30 p.m., and all after that is over-
-time.”40 (Does this Mr. Smith take no meals himself during 10½ hours?) “We (this
-same Smith) seldom leave off working before 6 p.m. (he means leave off the
-consumption of “our” labour-power machines), so that we (iterum Crispinus) are
-really working over-time the whole year round. For all these, children and adults
-alike (152 children and young persons and 140 adults), the average work for the
-last 18 months has been at the very least 7 days, 5 hours, or 78 1/2 hours a week.
-For the six weeks ending May 2nd this year (1862), the average was higher – 8
-days or 84 hours a week.”
-Still this same Mr. Smith, who is so extremely devoted to the pluralis majestatis [the Royal “we,”
-i.e., speaking on behalf of his subjects], adds with a smile, "Machine-work is not great.” So the
-employers in the block-printing say: “Hand labour is more healthy than machine work.” On the
-whole, manufacturers declare with indignation against the proposal “to stop the machines at least
-during meal-times.”
-“A clause,” says Mr. Otley, manager of a wall-paper factory in the Borough,
-“which allowed work between, say 6 a.m. and 9 p.m. in would suit us (!) very
-well, but the factory hours, 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., are not suitable. Our machine is
-always stopped for dinner. (What generosity!) There is no waste of paper and
-171 Chapter 10
-colour to speak of. But,” he adds sympathetically, “I can understand the loss of
-time not being liked.”
-The report of the Commission opines with naïveté that the fear of some “leading firms” of losing
-time, i.e., the time for appropriating the labour of others, and thence losing profit is not a
-sufficient reason for allowing children under 13, and young persons under 18, working 12 to 16
-hours per day, to lose their dinner, nor for giving it to them as coal and water are supplied to the
-steam-engine, soap to wool, oil to the wheel – as merely auxiliary material to the instruments of
-labour, during the process of production itself.41
-No branch of industry in England (we do not take into account the making of bread by machinery
-recently introduced) has preserved up to the present day a method of production so archaic, so –
-as we see from the poets of the Roman Empire – pre-christian, as baking. But capital, as was said
-earlier, is at first indifferent as to the technical character of the labour-process; it begins by taking
-it just as it finds it.
-The incredible adulteration of bread, especially in London, was first revealed by the House of
-Commons Committee “on the adulteration of articles of food” (1855-56), and Dr. Hassall’s work,
-“Adulterations detected.” 42 The consequence of these revelations was the Act of August 6th,
-1860, “for preventing the adulteration of articles of food and drink,” an inoperative law, as it
-naturally shows the tenderest consideration for every Free-trader who determines by the buying
-or selling of adulterated commodities “to turn an honest penny.” 43The Committee itself
-formulated more or less naïvely its conviction that Free-trade meant essentially trade with
-adulterated, or as the English ingeniously put it, “sophisticated” goods. In fact this kind of
-sophistry knows better than Protagoras how to make white black, and black white, and better than
-the Eleatics how to demonstrate ad oculos [before your own eyes] that everything is only
-appearance. 44
-At all events the Committee had directed the attention of the public to its “daily bread,” and
-therefore to the baking trade. At the same time in public meetings and in petitions to Parliament
-rose the cry of the London journeymen bakers against their over-work, &c. The cry was so urgent
-that Mr. H. S. Tremenheere, also a member of the Commission of 1863 several times mentioned,
-was appointed Royal Commissioner of Inquiry. His report, 45 together with the evidence given,
-roused not the heart of the public but its stomach. Englishmen, always well up in the Bible, knew
-well enough that man, unless by elective grace a capitalist, or landlord, or sinecurist, is
-commanded to eat his bread in the sweat of his brow, but they did not know that he had to eat
-daily in his bread a certain quantity of human perspiration mixed with the discharge of abscesses,
-cobwebs, dead black-beetles, and putrid German yeast, without counting alum, sand, and other
-agreeable mineral ingredients. Without any regard to his holiness, Free-trade, the free baking-
-trade was therefore placed under the supervision of the State inspectors (Close of the
-Parliamentary session of 1863), and by the same Act of Parliament, work from 9 in the evening to
-5 in the morning was forbidden for journeymen bakers under 18. The last clause speaks volumes
-as to the over-work in this old-fashioned, homely line of business.
-“The work of a London journeyman baker begins, as a rule, at about eleven at
-night. At that hour he ‘makes the dough,’ – a laborious process, which lasts from
-half an hour to three quarters of an hour, according to the size of the batch or the
-labour bestowed upon it. He then lies down upon the kneading-board, which is
-also the covering of the trough in which the dough is ‘made’; and with a sack
-under him, and another rolled up as a pillow, he sleeps for about a couple of
-hours. He is then engaged in a rapid and continuous labour for about five hours –
-throwing out the dough, ‘scaling it off,’ moulding it, putting it into the oven,
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-preparing and baking rolls and fancy bread, taking the batch bread out of the oven,
-and up into the shop, &c., &c. The temperature of a bakehouse ranges from about
-75 to upwards of 90 degrees, and in the smaller bakehouses approximates usually
-to the higher rather than to the lower degree of heat. When the business of making
-the bread, rolls, &c., is over, that of its distribution begins, and a considerable
-proportion of the journeymen in the trade, after working hard in the manner
-described during the night, are upon their legs for many hours during the day,
-carrying baskets, or wheeling hand-carts, and sometimes again in the bakehouse,
-leaving off work at various hours between 1 and 6 p.m. according to the season of
-the year, or the amount and nature of their master’s business; while others are
-again engaged in the bakehouse in ‘bringing out’ more batches until late in the
-afternoon. 46... During what is called ‘the London season,’ the operatives
-belonging to the ‘full-priced’ bakers at the West End of the town, generally begin
-work at 11 p.m., and are engaged in making the bread, with one or two short
-(sometimes very short) intervals of rest, up to 8 o’clock the next morning. They
-are then engaged all day long, up to 4, 5, 6, and as late as 7 o’clock in the evening
-carrying out bread, or sometimes in the afternoon in the bakehouse again,
-assisting in the biscuit-baking. They may have, after they have done their work,
-sometimes five or six, sometimes only four or five hours’ sleep before they begin
-again. On Fridays they always begin sooner, some about ten o’clock, and continue
-in some cases, at work, either in making or delivering the bread up to 8 p.m. on
-Saturday night, but more generally up to 4 or 5 o’clock, Sunday morning. On
-Sundays the men must attend twice or three times during the day for an hour or
-two to make preparations for the next day’s bread.... The men employed by the
-underselling masters (who sell their bread under the ‘full price,’ and who, as
-already pointed out, comprise three-fourths of the London bakers) have not only
-to work on the average longer hours, but their work is almost entirely confined to
-the bakehouse. The underselling masters generally sell their bread... in the shop. If
-they send it out, which is not common, except as supplying chandlers’ shops, they
-usually employ other hands for that purpose. It is not their practice to deliver
-bread from house to house. Towards the end of the week ... the men begin on
-Thursday night at 10 o’clock, and continue on with only slight intermission until
-late on Saturday evening.” 47
-Even the bourgeois intellect understands the position of the “underselling” masters. “The unpaid
-labour of the men was made the source whereby the competition was carried on.” 48 And the
-“full-priced” baker denounces his underselling competitors to the Commission of Inquiry as
-thieves of foreign labour and adulterators.
-“They only exist now by first defrauding the public, and next getting 18 hours’
-work out of their men for 12 hours’ wages.” 49
-The adulteration of bread and the formation of a class of bakers that sells the bread below the full
-price, date from the beginning of the 18th century, from the time when the corporate character of
-the trade was lost, and the capitalist in the form of the miller or flour-factor, rises behind the
-nominal master baker.50 Thus was laid the foundation of capitalistic production in this trade, of
-the unlimited extension of the working day and of night-labour, although the latter only since
-1824 gained a serious footing, even in London. 51
-After what has just been said, it will be understood that the Report of the Commission classes
-journeymen bakers among the short-lived labourers, who, having by good luck escaped the
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-normal decimation of the children of the working-class, rarely reach the age of 42. Nevertheless,
-the baking trade is always overwhelmed with applicants. The sources of the supply of these
-labour-powers to London are Scotland, the western agricultural districts of England, and
-Germany.
-In the years 1858-60, the journeymen bakers in Ireland organised at their own expense great
-meetings to agitate against night and Sunday work. The public – e.g., at the Dublin meeting in
-May, 1860 – took their part with Irish warmth. As a result of this movement, day-labour alone
-was successfully established in Wexford, Kilkenny, Clonmel, Waterford, &c.
-“In Limerick, where the grievances of the journeymen are demonstrated to be
-excessive, the movement has been defeated by the opposition of the master
-bakers, the miller bakers being the greatest opponents. The example of Limerick
-led to a retrogression in Ennis and Tipperary. In Cork, where the strongest
-possible demonstration of feeling took place, the masters, by exercising their
-power of turning the men out of employment, have defeated the movement. In
-Dublin, the master bakers have offered the most determined opposition to the
-movement, and by discountenancing as much as possible the journeymen
-promoting it, have succeeded in leading the men into acquiescence in Sunday
-work and night-work, contrary to the convictions of the men.” 52
-The Committee of the English Government, which Government, in Ireland, is armed to the teeth,
-and generally knows how to show it, remonstrates in mild, though funereal, tones with the
-implacable master bakers of Dublin, Limerick, Cork, &c.:
-“The Committee believe that the hours of labour are limited by natural laws,
-which cannot be violated with impunity. That for master bakers to induce their
-workmen, by the fear of losing employment, to violate their religious convictions
-and their better feelings, to disobey the laws of the land, and to disregard public
-opinion (this all refers to Sunday labour), is calculated to provoke ill-feeling
-between workmen and masters, ... and affords an example dangerous to religion,
-morality, and social order.... The Committee believe that any constant work
-beyond 12 hours a-day encroaches on the domestic and private life of the
-working-man, and so leads to disastrous moral results, interfering with each man’s
-home, and the discharge of his family duties as a son, a brother, a husband, a
-father. That work beyond 12 hours has a tendency to undermine the health of the
-workingman, and so leads to premature old age and death, to the great injury of
-families of working-men, thus deprived of the care and support of the head of the
-family when most required.” 53
-So far, we have dealt with Ireland. On the other side of the channel, in Scotland, the agricultural
-labourer, the ploughman, protests against his 13-14 hours’ work in the most inclement climate,
-with 4 hours’ additional work on Sunday (in this land of Sabbatarians!), 54 whilst, at the same
-time, three railway men are standing before a London coroner’s jury – a guard, an engine-driver,
-a signalman. A tremendous railway accident has hurried hundreds of passengers into another
-world. The negligence of the employee is the cause of the misfortune. They declare with one
-voice before the jury that ten or twelve years before, their labour only lasted eight hours a-day.
-During the last five or six years it had been screwed up to 14, 18, and 20 hours, and under a
-specially severe pressure of holiday-makers, at times of excursion trains, it often lasted for 40 or
-50 hours without a break. They were ordinary men, not Cyclops. At a certain point their labour-
-power failed. Torpor seized them. Their brain ceased to think, their eyes to see. The thoroughly
-“respectable” British jurymen answered by a verdict that sent them to the next assizes on a charge
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-of manslaughter, and, in a gentle “rider” to their verdict, expressed the pious hope that the
-capitalistic magnates of the railways would, in future, be more extravagant in the purchase of a
-sufficient quantity of labour-power, and more “abstemious,” more “self-denying,” more “thrifty,”
-in the draining of paid labour-power. 55
-From the motley crowd of labourers of all callings, ages, sexes, that press on us more busily than
-the souls of the slain on Ulysses, on whom – without referring to the Blue books under their arms
-– we see at a glance the mark of over-work, let us take two more figures whose striking contrast
-proves that before capital all men are alike – a milliner and a blacksmith.
-In the last week of June, 1863, all the London daily papers published a paragraph with the
-“sensational” heading, “Death from simple over-work.” It dealt with the death of the milliner,
-Mary Anne Walkley, 20 years of age, employed in a highly-respectable dressmaking
-establishment, exploited by a lady with the pleasant name of Elise. The old, often-told story, 56
-was once more recounted. This girl worked, on an average, 16½ hours, during the season often 30
-hours, without a break, whilst her failing labour-power was revived by occasional supplies of
-sherry, port, or coffee. It was just now the height of the season. It was necessary to conjure up in
-the twinkling of an eye the gorgeous dresses for the noble ladies bidden to the ball in honour of
-the newly-imported Princess of Wales. Mary Anne Walkley had worked without intermission for
-26½ hours, with 60 other girls, 30 in one room, that only afforded 1/3 of the cubic feet of air
-required for them. At night, they slept in pairs in one of the stifling holes into which the bedroom
-was divided by partitions of board.57 And this was one of the best millinery establishments in
-London. Mary Anne Walkley fell ill on the Friday, died on Sunday, without, to the astonishment
-of Madame Elise, having previously completed the work in hand. The doctor, Mr. Keys, called
-too late to the death-bed, duly bore witness before the coroner’s jury that
-“Mary Anne Walkley had died from long hours of work in an over-crowded work-
-room, and a too small and badly ventilated bedroom.”
-In order to give the doctor a lesson in good manners, the coroner’s jury thereupon brought in a
-verdict that
-“the deceased had died of apoplexy, but there was reason to fear that her death
-had been accelerated by over-work in an over-crowded workroom, &c.”
-“Our white slaves,” cried the Morning Star, the organ of the Free-traders, Cobden and Bright,
-“our white slaves, who are toiled into the grave, for the most part silently pine and die.” 58
-“It is not in dressmakers’ rooms that working to death is the order of the day, but
-in a thousand other places; in every place I had almost said, where ‘a thriving
-business’ has to be done.... We will take the blacksmith as a type. If the poets
-were true, there is no man so hearty, so merry, as the blacksmith; he rises early
-and strikes his sparks before the sun; he eats and drinks and sleeps as no other
-man. Working in moderation, he is, in fact, in one of the best of human positions,
-physically speaking. But we follow him into the city or town, and we see the
-stress of work on that strong man, and what then is his position in the death-rate of
-his country. In Marylebone, blacksmiths die at the rate of 31 per thousand per
-annum, or 11 above the mean of the male adults of the country in its entirety. The
-occupation, instinctive almost as a portion of human art, unobjectionable as a
-branch of human industry, is made by mere excess of work, the destroyer of the
-man. He can strike so many blows per day, walk so many steps, breathe so many
-breaths, produce so much work, and live an average, say of fifty years; he is made
-to strike so many more blows, to walk so many more steps, to breathe so many
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-more breaths per day, and to increase altogether a fourth of his life. He meets the
-effort; the result is, that producing for a limited time a fourth more work, he dies
-at 37 for 50.” 59
-Section 4: Day and Night Work. The Relay System
-Constant capital, the means of production, considered from the standpoint of the creation of
-surplus-value, only exist to absorb labour, and with every drop of labour a proportional quantity
-of surplus labour. While they fail to do this, their mere existence causes a relative loss to the
-capitalist, for they represent during the time they lie fallow, a useless advance of capital. And this
-loss becomes positive and absolute as soon as the intermission of their employment necessitates
-additional outlay at the recommencement of work. The prolongation of the working day beyond
-the limits of the natural day, into the night, only acts as a palliative. It quenches only in a slight
-degree the vampire thirst for the living blood of labour. To appropriate labour during all the 24
-hours of the day is, therefore, the inherent tendency of capitalist production. But as it is physically
-impossible to exploit the same individual labour-power constantly during the night as well as the
-day, to overcome this physical hindrance, an alternation becomes necessary between the
-workpeople whose powers are exhausted by day, and those who are used up by night. This
-alternation may be effected in various ways; e.g., it may be so arranged that part of the workers
-are one week employed on day-work, the next week on night-work. It is well known that this
-relay system, this alternation of two sets of workers, held full sway in the full-blooded youth-time
-of the English cotton manufacture, and that at the present time it still flourishes, among others, in
-the cotton spinning of the Moscow district. This 24 hours’ process of production exists to-day as
-a system in many of the branches of industry of Great Britain that are still “free,” in the blast-
-furnaces, forges, plate-rolling mills, and other metallurgical establishments in England, Wales,
-and Scotland. The working-time here includes, besides the 24 hours of the 6 working days, a
-great part also of the 24 hours of Sunday. The workers consist of men and women, adults and
-children of both sexes. The ages of the children and young persons run through all intermediate
-grades, from 8 (in some cases from 6) to 18. 60
-In some branches of industry, the girls and women work through the night together with the
-males. 61
-Placing on one side the generally injurious influence of night-labour,62 the duration of the process
-of production, unbroken during the 24 hours, offers very welcome opportunities of exceeding the
-limits of the normal working day, e.g., in the branches of industry already mentioned, which are
-of an exceedingly fatiguing nature; the official working day means for each worker usually 12
-hours by night or day. But the over-work beyond this amount is in many cases, to use the words
-of the English official report, “truly fearful.” 63
-“It is impossible,” the report continues, “for any mind to realise the amount of
-work described in the following passages as being performed by boys of from 9 to
-12 years of age ... without coming irresistibly to the conclusion that such abuses of
-the power of parents and of employers can no longer be allowed to exist.” 64
-"The practice of boys working at all by day and night turns either in the usual
-course of things, or at pressing times, seems inevitably to open the door to their
-not unfrequently working unduly long hours. These hours are, indeed, in some
-cases, not only cruelly but even incredibly long for children. Amongst a number
-of boys it will, of course, not unfrequently happen that one or more are from some
-cause absent. When this happens, their place is made up by one or more boys,
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-who work in the other turn. That this is a well understood system is plain ... from
-the answer of the manager of some large rolling-mills, who, when I asked him
-how the place of the boys absent from their turn was made up, ‘I daresay, sir, you
-know that as well as I do,’ and admitted the fact.” 65
-“At a rolling-mill where the proper hours were from 6 a.m. to 5½ p.m., a boy
-worked about four nights every week till 8½ p.m. at least ... and this for six
-months. Another, at 9 years old, sometimes made three 12-hour shifts running,
-and, when 10, has made two days and two nights running.” A third, “now 10 ...
-worked from 6 a.m. till 12 p.m. three nights, and till 9 p.m. the other nights.”
-“Another, now 13, ... worked from 6 p.m. till 12 noon next day, for a week
-together, and sometimes for three shifts together, e.g., from Monday morning till
-Tuesday night.” “Another, now 12, has worked in an iron foundry at Stavely from
-6 a.m. till 12 p.m. for a fortnight on end; could not do it any more.” “George
-Allinsworth, age 9, came here as cellar-boy last Friday; next morning we had to
-begin at 3, so I stopped here all night. Live five miles off. Slept on the floor of the
-furnace, over head, with an apron under me, and a bit of a jacket over me. The two
-other days I have been here at 6 a.m. Aye! it is hot in here. Before I came here I
-was nearly a year at the same work at some works in the country. Began there,
-too, at 3 on Saturday morning – always did, but was very gain [near] home, and
-could sleep at home. Other days I began at 6 in the morning, and gi’en over at 6 or
-7 in the evening,” &c. 66
-Let us now hear how capital itself regards this 24 hours’ system. The extreme forms of the
-system, its abuse in the “cruel and incredible” extension of the working day are naturally passed
-over in silence. Capital only speaks of the system in its “normal” form.
-Messrs. Naylor & Vickers, steel manufacturers, who employ between 600 and 700 persons,
-among whom only 10 per cent are under 18, and of those, only 20 boys under 18 work in night
-sets, thus express themselves:
-“The boys do not suffer from the heat. The temperature is probably from 86° to
-90°.... At the forges and in the rolling mills the hands work night and day, in
-relays, but all the other parts of the work are day-work, i.e., from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m.
-In the forge the hours are from 12 to 12. Some of the hands always work in the
-night, without any alternation of day and night work.... We do not find any
-difference in the health of those who work regularly by night and those who work
-by day, and probably people can sleep better if they have the same period of rest
-than if it is changed.... About 20 of the boys under the age of 18 work in the night
-sets.... We could not well do without lads under 18 working by night. The
-objection would be the increase in the cost of production.... Skilled hands and the
-heads in every department are difficult to get, but of lads we could get any
-number.... But from the small proportion of boys that we employ, the subject (i.e.,
-of restrictions on night-work) is of little importance or interest to us.” 67
-Mr. J. Ellis, one of the firm of Messrs. John Brown & Co., steel and iron works, employing about
-3,000 men and boys, part of whose operations, namely, iron and heavier steel work, goes on night
-and day by relays, states “that in the heavier steel work one or two boys are employed to a score
-or two men.” Their concern employs upwards of 500 boys under 18, of whom about 1/3 or 170
-are under the age of 13. With reference to the proposed alteration of the law, Mr. Ellis says:
-“I do not think it would be very objectionable to require that no person under the
-age of 18 should work more than 12 hours in the 24. But we do not think that any
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-line could be drawn over the age of 12, at which boys could be dispensed with for
-night-work. But we would sooner be prevented from employing boys under the
-age of 13, or even so high as 14, at all, than not be allowed to employ boys that
-we do have at night. Those boys who work in the day sets must take their turn in
-the night sets also, because the men could not work in the night sets only; it would
-ruin their health.... We think, however, that night-work in alternate weeks is no
-harm.”
-(Messrs. Naylor & Vickers, on the other hand, in conformity with the interest of their business,
-considered that periodically changed night-labour might possibly do more harm than continual
-night-labour.)
-“We find the men who do it, as well as the others who do other work only by
-day.... Our objections to not allowing boys under 18 to work at night, would be on
-account of the increase of expense, but this is the only reason.”
-(What cynical naïveté!) “We think that the increase would be more than the trade,
-with due regard to its being successfully carried out, could fairly bear. (What
-mealy-mouthed phraseology!) Labour is scarce here, and might fall short if there
-were such a regulation.” (i.e., Ellis Brown & Co. might fall into the fatal
-perplexity of being obliged to pay labour-power its full value.) 68
-The “Cyclops Steel and Iron Works,” of Messrs. Cammell & Co., are concocted on the same
-large scale as those of the above-mentioned John Brown & Co. The managing director had
-handed in his evidence to the Government Commissioner, Mr. White, in writing. Later he found it
-convenient to suppress the MS. when it had been returned to him for revision. Mr. White,
-however, has a good memory. He remembered quite clearly that for the Messrs. Cyclops the
-forbidding of the night-labour of children and young persons “would be impossible, it would be
-tantamount to stopping their works,” and yet their business employs little more than 6% of boys
-under 18, and less than 1% under 13. 69
-On the same subject Mr. E. F. Sanderson, of the firm of Sanderson, Bros., & Co., steel rolling-
-mills and forges, Attercliffe, says:
-“Great difficulty would be caused by preventing boys under 18 from working at
-night. The chief would be the increase of cost from employing men instead of
-boys. I cannot say what this would be, but probably it would not be enough to
-enable the manufacturers to raise the price of steel, and consequently it would fall
-on them, as of course the men (what queer-headed folk!) would refuse to pay it.”
-Mr. Sanderson does not know how much he pays the children, but
-“perhaps the younger boys get from 4s. to 5s. a week.... The boys’ work is of a
-kind for which the strength of the boys is generally (‘generally,’ of course not
-always) quite sufficient, and consequently there would be no gain in the greater
-strength of the men to counterbalance the loss, or it would be only in the few cases
-in which the metal is heavy. The men would not like so well not to have boys
-under them, as men would be less obedient. Besides, boys must begin young to
-learn the trade. Leaving day-work alone open to boys would not answer this
-purpose.”
-And why not? Why could not boys learn their handicraft in the day-time? Your reason?
-“Owing to the men working days and nights in alternate weeks, the men would be
-separated half the time from their boys, and would lose half the profit which they
-make from them. The training which they give to an apprentice is considered as
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-part of the return for the boys’ labour, and thus enables the man to get it at a
-cheaper rate. Each man would want half of this profit.”
-In other words, Messrs. Sanderson would have to pay part of the wages of the adult men out of
-their own pockets instead of by the night-work of the boys. Messrs. Sanderson’s profit would thus
-fall to some extent, and this is the good Sandersonian reason why boys cannot learn their
-handicraft in the day.70 In addition to this, it would throw night-labour on those who worked
-instead of the boys, which they would not be able to stand. The difficulties in fact would be so
-great that they would very likely lead to the giving up of night-work altogether, and “as far as the
-work itself is concerned,” says E. F. Sanderson, “this would suit as well, but –” But Messrs.
-Sanderson have something else to make besides steel. Steel-making is simply a pretext for
-surplus-value making. The smelting furnaces, rolling-mills, &c., the buildings, machinery, iron,
-coal, &c., have something more to do than transform themselves into steel. They are there to
-absorb surplus labour, and naturally absorb more in 24 hours than in 12. In fact they give, by
-grace of God and law, the Sandersons a cheque on the working-time of a certain number of hands
-for all the 24 hours of the day, and they lose their character as capital, are therefore a pure loss for
-the Sandersons, as soon as their function of absorbing labour is interrupted.
-“But then there would be the loss from so much expensive machinery, lying idle
-half the time, and to get through the amount of work which we are able to do on
-the present system, we should have to double our premises and plant, which
-would double the outlay.”
-But why should these Sandersons pretend to a privilege not enjoyed by the other capitalists who
-only work during the day, and whose buildings, machinery, raw material, therefore lie “idle”
-during the night? E. F. Sanderson answers in the name of all the Sandersons:
-“It is true that there is this loss from machinery lying idle in those manufactories
-in which work only goes on by day. But the use of furnaces would involve a
-further loss in our case. If they were kept up there would be a waste of fuel
-(instead of, as now, a waste of the living substance of the workers), and if they
-were not, there would be loss of time in laying the fires and getting the heat up
-(whilst the loss of sleeping time, even to children of 8 is a gain of working-time
-for the Sanderson tribe), and the furnaces themselves would suffer from the
-changes of temperature.” (Whilst those same furnaces suffer nothing from the day
-and night change of labour.) 71
-Section 5: The Struggle for a Normal Working Day.
-Compulsory Laws for the Extension of the Working Day
-from the Middle of the 14th to the End of the 17th
-Century
-“What is a working day? What is the length of time during which capital may consume the
-labour-power whose daily value it buys? How far may the working day be extended beyond the
-working-time necessary for the reproduction of labour-power itself?” It has been seen that to
-these questions capital replies: the working day contains the full 24 hours, with the deduction of
-the few hours of repose without which labour-power absolutely refuses its services again. Hence
-it is self-evident that the labourer is nothing else, his whole life through, than labour-power, that
-therefore all his disposable time is by nature and law labour-time, to be devoted to the self-
-expansion of capital. Time for education, for intellectual development, for the fulfilling of social
-179 Chapter 10
-functions and for social intercourse, for the free-play of his bodily and mental activity, even the
-rest time of Sunday (and that in a country of Sabbatarians!)72 – moonshine! But in its blind
-unrestrainable passion, its were-wolf hunger for surplus labour, capital oversteps not only the
-moral, but even the merely physical maximum bounds of the working day. It usurps the time for
-growth, development, and healthy maintenance of the body. It steals the time required for the
-consumption of fresh air and sunlight. It higgles over a meal-time, incorporating it where possible
-with the process of production itself, so that food is given to the labourer as to a mere means of
-production, as coal is supplied to the boiler, grease and oil to the machinery. It reduces the sound
-sleep needed for the restoration, reparation, refreshment of the bodily powers to just so many
-hours of torpor as the revival of an organism, absolutely exhausted, renders essential. It is not the
-normal maintenance of the labour-power which is to determine the limits of the working day; it is
-the greatest possible daily expenditure of labour-power, no matter how diseased, compulsory, and
-painful it may be, which is to determine the limits of the labourers’ period of repose. Capital cares
-nothing for the length of life of labour-power. All that concerns it is simply and solely the
-maximum of labour-power, that can be rendered fluent in a working day. It attains this end by
-shortening the extent of the labourer’s life, as a greedy farmer snatches increased produce from
-the soil by robbing it of its fertility.
-The capitalistic mode of production (essentially the production of surplus-value, the absorption of
-surplus labour), produces thus, with the extension of the working day, not only the deterioration
-of human labour-power by robbing it of its normal, moral and physical, conditions of
-development and function. It produces also the premature exhaustion and death of this labour-
-power itself.73 It extends the labourer’s time of production during a given period by shortening
-his actual life-time.
-But the value of the labour-power includes the value of the commodities necessary for the
-reproduction of the worker, or for the keeping up of the working-class. If then the unnatural
-extension of the working day, that capital necessarily strives after in its unmeasured passion for
-self-expansion, shortens the length of life of the individual labourer, and therefore the duration of
-his labour-power, the forces used up have to be replaced at a more rapid rate and the sum of the
-expenses for the reproduction of labour-power will be greater; just as in a machine the part of its
-value to be reproduced every day is greater the more rapidly the machine is worn out. It would
-seem therefore that the interest of capital itself points in the direction of a normal working day.
-The slave-owner buys his labourer as he buys his horse. If he loses his slave, he loses capital that
-can only be restored by new outlay in the slave-mart.
-But “the rice-grounds of Georgia, or the swamps of the Mississippi may be fatally
-injurious to the human constitution; but the waste of human life which the
-cultivation of these districts necessitates, is not so great that it cannot be repaired
-from the teeming preserves of Virginia and Kentucky. Considerations of
-economy, moreover, which, under a natural system, afford some security for
-humane treatment by identifying the master’s interest with the slave’s
-preservation, when once trading in slaves is practiced, become reasons for racking
-to the uttermost the toil of the slave; for, when his place can at once be supplied
-from foreign preserves, the duration of his life becomes a matter of less moment
-than its productiveness while it lasts. It is accordingly a maxim of slave
-management, in slave-importing countries, that the most effective economy is that
-which takes out of the human chattel in the shortest space of time the utmost
-amount of exertion it is capable of putting forth. It is in tropical culture, where
-annual profits often equal the whole capital of plantations, that negro life is most
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-recklessly sacrificed. It is the agriculture of the West Indies, which has been for
-centuries prolific of fabulous wealth, that has engulfed millions of the African
-race. It is in Cuba, at this day, whose revenues are reckoned by millions, and
-whose planters are princes, that we see in the servile class, the coarsest fare, the
-most exhausting and unremitting toil, and even the absolute destruction of a
-portion of its numbers every year.”74
-Mutato nomine de te fabula narratur [It is of you that the story is told – Horace]. For slave-trade
-read labour-market, for Kentucky and Virginia, Ireland and the agricultural districts of England,
-Scotland, and Wales, for Africa, Germany. We heard how over-work thinned the ranks of the
-bakers in London. Nevertheless, the London labour-market is always over-stocked with German
-and other candidates for death in the bakeries. Pottery, as we saw, is one of the shortest-lived
-industries. Is there any want therefore of potters? Josiah Wedgwood, the inventor of modern
-pottery, himself originally a common workman, said in 1785 before the House of Commons that
-the whole trade employed from 15,000 to 20,000 people.75 In the year 1861 the population alone
-of the town centres of this industry in Great Britain numbered 101,302.
-“The cotton trade has existed for ninety years.... It has existed for three
-generations of the English race, and I believe I may safely say that during that
-period it has destroyed nine generations of factory operatives.” 76
-No doubt in certain epochs of feverish activity the labour-market shows significant gaps. In 1834,
-e.g. But then the manufacturers proposed to the Poor Law Commissioners that they should send
-the “surplus-population” of the agricultural districts to the north, with the explanation “that the
-manufacturers would absorb and use it up.” 77
-Agents were appointed with the consent of the Poor Law Commissioners. ... An
-office was set up in Manchester, to which lists were sent of those workpeople in
-the agricultural districts wanting employment, and their names were registered in
-books. The manufacturers attended at these offices, and selected such persons as
-they chose; when they had selected such persons as their ‘wants required’, they
-gave instructions to have them forwarded to Manchester, and they were sent,
-ticketed like bales of goods, by canals, or with carriers, others tramping on the
-road, and many of them were found on the way lost and half-starved. This system
-had grown up unto a regular trade. This House will hardly believe it, but I tell
-them, that this traffic in human flesh was as well kept up, they were in effect as
-regularly sold to these [Manchester] manufacturers as slaves are sold to the
-cotton-grower in the United States.... In 1860, ‘the cotton trade was at its zenith.’
-... The manufacturers again found that they were short of hands.... They applied to
-the ‘flesh agents, as they are called. Those agents sent to the southern downs of
-England, to the pastures of Dorsetshire, to the glades of Devonshire, to the people
-tending kine in Wiltshire, but they sought in vain. The surplus-population was
-‘absorbed.’”
-The Bury Guardian said, on the completion of the French treaty, that “10,000 additional hands
-could be absorbed by Lancashire, and that 30,000 or 40,000 will be needed.” After the “flesh
-agents and sub-agents” had in vain sought through the agricultural districts,
-“a deputation came up to London, and waited on the right hon. gentleman [Mr.
-Villiers, President of the Poor Law Board] with a view of obtaining poor children
-from certain union houses for the mills of Lancashire.” 78
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-What experience shows to the capitalist generally is a constant excess of population, i.e., an
-excess in relation to the momentary requirements of surplus labour-absorbing capital, although
-this excess is made up of generations of human beings stunted, short-lived, swiftly replacing each
-other, plucked, so to say, before maturity.79 And, indeed, experience shows to the intelligent
-observer with what swiftness and grip the capitalist mode of production, dating, historically
-speaking, only from yesterday, has seized the vital power of the people by the very root – shows
-how the degeneration of the industrial population is only retarded by the constant absorption of
-primitive and physically uncorrupted elements from the country – shows how even the country
-labourers, in spite of fresh air and the principle of natural selection, that works so powerfully
-amongst them, and only permits the survival of the strongest, are already beginning to die off. 80
-Capital that has such good reasons for denying the sufferings of the legions of workers that
-surround it, is in practice moved as much and as little by the sight of the coming degradation and
-final depopulation of the human race, as by the probable fall of the earth into the sun. In every
-stockjobbing swindle every one knows that some time or other the crash must come, but every
-one hopes that it may fall on the head of his neighbour, after he himself has caught the shower of
-gold and placed it in safety. Après moi le déluge! [After me, the flood] is the watchword of every
-capitalist and of every capitalist nation. Hence Capital is reckless of the health or length of life of
-the labourer, unless under compulsion from society.81 To the out-cry as to the physical and mental
-degradation, the premature death, the torture of over-work, it answers: Ought these to trouble us
-since they increase our profits? But looking at things as a whole, all this does not, indeed, depend
-on the good or ill will of the individual capitalist. Free competition brings out the inherent laws of
-capitalist production, in the shape of external coercive laws having power over every individual
-capitalist.82
-The establishment of a normal working day is the result of centuries of struggle between capitalist
-and labourer. The history of this struggle shows two opposed tendencies. Compare, e.g., the
-English factory legislation of our time with the English labour Statutes from the 14th century to
-well into the middle of the 18th.83 Whilst the modern Factory Acts compulsorily shortened the
-working day, the earlier statutes tried to lengthen it by compulsion. Of course the pretensions of
-capital in embryo – when, beginning to grow, it secures the right of absorbing a quantum sufficit
-[sufficient quantity] of surplus labour, not merely by the force of economic relations, but by the
-help of the State – appear very modest when put face to face with the concessions that, growling
-and struggling, it has to make in its adult condition. It takes centuries ere the “free” labourer,
-thanks to the development of capitalistic production, agrees, i.e., is compelled by social
-conditions, to sell the whole of his active life. his very capacity for work, for the price of the
-necessaries of life, his birth-right for a mess of pottage. Hence it is natural that the lengthening of
-the working day, which capital, from the middle of the 14th to the end of the 17th century, tries to
-impose by State-measures on adult labourers, approximately coincides with the shortening of the
-working day which, in the second half of the 19th century, has here and there been effected by the
-State to prevent the coining of children’s blood into capital. That which to-day, e.g., in the State
-of Massachusetts, until recently the freest State of the North-American Republic, has been
-proclaimed as the statutory limit of the labour of children under 12, was in England, even in the
-middle of the 17th century, the normal working day of able-bodied artisans, robust labourers,
-athletic blacksmiths.84
-The first “Statute of Labourers” (23 Edward III., 1349) found its immediate pretext (not its cause,
-for legislation of this kind lasts centuries after the pretext for it has disappeared) in the great
-plague that decimated the people, so that, as a Tory writer says, “The difficulty of getting men to
-work on reasonable terms (i.e., at a price that left their employers a reasonable quantity of surplus
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-labour) grew to such a height as to be quite intolerable.” 85Reasonable wages were, therefore,
-fixed by law as well as the limits of the working day. The latter point, the only one that here
-interests us, is repeated in the Statute of 1496 (Henry VII.). The working day for all artificers and
-field labourers from March to September ought, according to this statute (which, however, could
-not be enforced), to last from 5 in the morning to between 7 and 8 in the evening. But the meal-
-times consist of 1 hour for breakfast, 1½ hours for dinner, and ½ an hour for “noon-meate,” i.e.,
-exactly twice as much as under the factory acts now in force.86 In winter, work was to last from 5
-in the morning until dark, with the same intervals. A statute of Elizabeth of 1562 leaves the length
-of the working day for all labourers “hired for daily or weekly wage” untouched, but aims at
-limiting the intervals to 2½ hours in the summer, or to 2 in the winter. Dinner is only to last 1
-hour, and the “afternoon-sleep of half an hour” is only allowed between the middle of May and
-the middle of August. For every hour of absence 1d. is to be subtracted from the wage. In
-practice, however, the conditions were much more favourable to the labourers than in the statute-
-book. William Petty, the father of Political Economy, and to some extent the founder of Statistics,
-says in a work that he published in the last third of the 17th century:
-“Labouring-men (then meaning field-labourers) work 10 hours per diem, and
-make 20 meals per week, viz., 3 a day for working days, and 2 on Sundays;
-whereby it is plain, that if they could fast on Friday nights, and dine in one hour
-and an half, whereas they take two, from eleven to one; thereby thus working 1/20
-more, and spending 1/20 less, the above-mentioned (tax) might be raised.” 87
-Was not Dr. Andrew Ure right in crying down the 12 hours’ bill of 1833 as a retrogression to the
-times of the dark ages? It is true these regulations contained in the statute mentioned by Petty,
-apply also to apprentices. But the condition of child-labour, even at the end of the 17th century, is
-seen from the following complaint:
-“’Tis not their practice (in Germany) as with us in this kingdom, to bind an
-apprentice for seven years; three or four is their common standard: and the reason
-is, because they are educated from their cradle to something of employment,
-which renders them the more apt and docile, and consequently the more capable
-of attaining to a ripeness and quicker proficiency in business. Whereas our youth,
-here in England, being bred to nothing before they come to be apprentices, make a
-very slow progress and require much longer time wherein to reach the perfection
-of accomplished artists.”88
-Still, during the greater part of the 18th century, up to the epoch of Modern Industry and
-machinism, capital in England had not succeeded in seizing for itself, by the payment of the
-weekly value of labour-power, the whole week of the labourer, with the exception, however, of
-the agricultural labourers. The fact that they could live for a whole week on the wage of four
-days, did not appear to the labourers a sufficient reason that they should work the other two days
-for the capitalist. One party of English economists, in the interest of capital, denounces this
-obstinacy in the most violent manner, another party defends the labourers. Let us listen, e.g., to
-the contest between Postlethwayt whose Dictionary of Trade then had the same reputation as the
-kindred works of MacCulloch and MacGregor to-day, and the author (already quoted) of the
-“Essay on Trade and Commerce.” 89
-Postlethwayt says among other things:
-“We cannot put an end to those few observations, without noticing that trite
-remark in the mouth of too many; that if the industrious poor can obtain enough to
-maintain themselves in five days, they will not work the whole six. Whence they
-infer the necessity of even the necessaries of life being made dear by taxes, or any
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-other means, to compel the working artisan and manufacturer to labour the whole
-six days in the week, without ceasing. I must beg leave to differ in sentiment from
-those great politicians, who contend for the perpetual slavery of the working
-people of this kingdom; they forget the vulgar adage, all work and no play. Have
-not the English boasted of the ingenuity and dexterity of her working artists and
-manufacturers which have heretofore given credit and reputation to British wares
-in general? What has this been owing to? To nothing more probably than the
-relaxation of the working people in their own way. Were they obliged to toil the
-year round, the whole six days in the week, in a repetition of the same work,
-might it not blunt their ingenuity, and render them stupid instead of alert and
-dexterous; and might not our workmen lose their reputation instead of maintaining
-it by such eternal slavery? ... And what sort of workmanship could we expect from
-such hard-driven animals? ... Many of them will execute as much work in four
-days as a Frenchman will in five or six. But if Englishmen are to be eternal
-drudges, ‘tis to be feared they will degenerate below the Frenchmen. As our
-people are famed for bravery in war, do we not say that it is owing to good
-English roast beef and pudding in their bellies, as well as their constitutional spirit
-of liberty? And why may not the superior ingenuity and dexterity of, our artists
-and manufacturers, be owing to that freedom and liberty to direct themselves in
-their own way, and I hope we shall never have them deprived of such privileges
-and that good living from whence their ingenuity no less than their courage may
-proceed.”90
-Thereupon the author of the “Essay on Trade and Commerce” replies:
-“If the making of every seventh day an holiday is supposed to be of divine
-institution, as it implies the appropriating the other six days to labour” (he means
-capital as we shall soon see) “surely it will not be thought cruel to enforce it ....
-That mankind in general, are naturally inclined to ease and indolence, we fatally
-experience to be true, from the conduct of our manufacturing populace, who do
-not labour, upon an average, above four days in a week, unless provisions happen
-to be very dear.... Put all the necessaries of the poor under one denomination; for
-instance, call them all wheat, or suppose that ... the bushel of wheat shall cost five
-shillings and that he (a manufacturer) earns a shilling by his labour, he then would
-be obliged to work five days only in a week. If the bushel of wheat should cost but
-four shillings, he would be obliged to work but four days; but as wages in this
-kingdom are much higher in proportion to the price of necessaries ... the
-manufacturer, who labours four days, has a surplus of money to live idle with the
-rest of the week . ... I hope I have said enough to make it appear that the moderate
-labour of six days in a week is no slavery. Our labouring people do this, and to all
-appearance are the happiest of all our labouring poor,91 but the Dutch do this in
-manufactures, and appear to be a very happy people. The French do so, when
-holidays do not intervene.92 But our populace have adopted a notion, that as
-Englishmen they enjoy a birthright privilege of being more free and independent
-than in any country in Europe. Now this idea, as far as it may affect the bravery of
-our troops, may be of some use; but the less the manufacturing poor have of it,
-certainly the better for themselves and for the State. The labouring people should
-never think themselves independent of their superiors.... It is extremely dangerous
-to encourage mobs in a commercial state like ours, where, perhaps, seven parts
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-out of eight of the whole, are people with little or no property. The cure will not
-be perfect, till our manufacturing poor are contented to labour six days for the
-same sum which they now earn in four days.” 93
-To this end, and for “extirpating idleness debauchery and excess,” promoting a spirit of industry,
-“lowering the price of labour in our manufactories, and easing the lands of the heavy burden of
-poor’s rates,” our “faithful Eckart” of capital proposes this approved device: to shut up such
-labourers as become dependent on public support, in a word, paupers, in “an ideal workhouse.”
-Such ideal workhouse must be made a “House of Terror,” and not an asylum for the poor, “where
-they are to be plentifully fed, warmly and decently clothed, and where they do but little work.” 94
-In this “House of Terror,” this “ideal workhouse, the poor shall work 14 hours in a day, allowing
-proper time for meals, in such manner that there shall remain 12 hours of neat-labour.”95
-Twelve working-hours daily in the Ideal Workhouse, in the “House of Terror” of 1770! 63 years
-later, in 1833, when the English Parliament reduced the working day for children of 13 to 18, in
-four branches of industry to 12 full hours, the judgment day of English Industry had dawned! In
-1852, when Louis Bonaparte sought to secure his position with the bourgeoisie by tampering with
-the legal working day, the French working people cried out with one voice “the law that limits the
-working day to 12 hours is the one good that has remained to us of the legislation of the
-Republic!” 96 At Zürich the work of children over 10, is limited to 12 hours; in Aargau in 1862,
-the work of children between 13 and 16, was reduced from 12½ to 12 hours; in Austria in 1860,
-for children between 14 and 16, the same reduction was made.97 “What a progress,” since 1770!
-Macaulay would shout with exultation!
-The “House of Terror” for paupers of which the capitalistic soul of 1770 only dreamed, was
-realised a few years later in the shape of a gigantic “Workhouse” for the industrial worker
-himself. It is called the Factory. And the ideal this time fades before the reality.
-Section 6: The Struggle for a Normal Working Day.
-Compulsory Limitation by Law of the Working-Time.
-English Factory Acts, 1833
-After capital had taken centuries in extending the working day to its normal maximum limit, and
-then beyond this to the limit of the natural day of 12 hours,98 there followed on the birth of
-machinism and modern industry in the last third of the 18th century, a violent encroachment like
-that of an avalanche in its intensity and extent. All bounds of morals and nature, age and sex, day
-and night, were broken down. Even the ideas of day and night, of rustic simplicity in the old
-statutes, became so confused that an English judge, as late as 1860, needed a quite Talmudic
-sagacity to explain “judicially” what was day and what was night.99 Capital celebrated its orgies.
-As soon as the working-class, stunned at first by the noise and turmoil of the new system of
-production, recovered, in some measure, its senses, its resistance began, and first in the native
-land of machinism, in England. For 30 years, however, the concessions conquered by the
-workpeople were purely nominal. Parliament passed 5 labour Laws between 1802 and 1833, but
-was shrewd enough not to vote a penny for their carrying out, for the requisite officials, &c. 100
-They remained a dead letter. “The fact is, that prior to the Act of 1833, young
-persons and children were worked all night, all day, or both ad libitum.”101
-A normal working day for modern industry only dates from the Factory Act of 1833, which
-included cotton, wool, flax, and silk factories. Nothing is more characteristic of the spirit of
-capital than the history of the English Factory Acts from 1833 to 1864.
-185 Chapter 10
-The Act of 1833 declares the ordinary factory working day to be from half-past five in the
-morning to half-past eight in the evening and within these limits, a period of 15 hours, it is lawful
-to employ young persons (i.e., persons between 13 and 18 years of age), at any time of the day,
-provided no one individual young person should work more than 12 hours in any one day, except
-in certain cases especially provided for. The 6th section of the Act provided. “That there shall be
-allowed in the course of every day not less than one and a half hours for meals to every such
-person restricted as hereinbefore provided.” The employment of children under 9, with exceptions
-mentioned later was forbidden; the work of children between 9 and 13 was limited to 8 hours a
-day, night-work, i.e., according to this Act, work between 8:30 p.m. and 5:30 a.m., was forbidden
-for all persons between 9 and 18.
-The law-makers were so far from wishing to trench on the freedom of capital to exploit adult
-labour-power, or, as they called it, “the freedom of labour,” that they created a special system in
-order to prevent the Factory Acts from having a consequence so outrageous.
-“The great evil of the factory system as at present conducted,” says the first report
-of the Central Board of the Commission of June 28th 1833, “has appeared to us to
-be that it entails the necessity of continuing the labour of children to the utmost
-length of that of the adults. The only remedy for this evil, short of the limitation of
-the labour of adults which would, in our opinion, create an evil greater than that
-which is sought to be remedied, appears to be the plan of working double sets of
-children.”
-... Under the name of System of Relays, this “plan” was therefore carried out, so that, e.g., from
-5.30 a.m. until 1.30 in the afternoon, one set of children between 9 and 13, and from 1.30 p.m. to
-8.30 in the evening another set were “put to,” &c.
-In order to reward the manufacturers for having, in the most barefaced way, ignored all the Acts
-as to children’s labour passed during the last twenty-two years, the pill was yet further gilded for
-them. Parliament decreed that after March 1st, 1834, no child under 11, after March 1st 1835, no
-child under 12, and after March 1st, 1836, no child under 13 was to work more than eight hours in
-a factory. This “liberalism,” so full of consideration for “capital,” was the more noteworthy as Dr.
-Farre, Sir A. Carlisle, Sir B. Brodie, Sir C. Bell, Mr. Guthrie, &c., in a word, the most
-distinguished physicians and surgeons in London, had declared in their evidence before the House
-of Commons, that there was danger in delay. Dr. Farre expressed himself still more coarsely.
-“Legislation is necessary for the prevention of death, in any form in which it can
-be prematurely inflicted, and certainly this (i.e., the factory method) must be
-viewed as a most cruel mode of inflicting it.”
-That same “reformed” Parliament, which in its delicate consideration for the manufacturers,
-condemned children under 13, for years to come, to 72 hours of work per week in the Factory
-Hell, on the other hand, in the Emancipation Act, which also administered freedom drop by drop,
-forbade the planters, from the outset, to work any negro slave more than 45 hours a week.
-But in no wise conciliated, capital now began a noisy agitation that went on for several years. It
-turned chiefly on the age of those who, under the name of children, were limited to 8 hours’
-work, and were subject to a certain amount of compulsory education. According to capitalistic
-anthropology, the age of childhood ended at 10, or at the outside, at 11. The more nearly the time
-approached for the coming into full force of the Factory Act, the fatal year 1836, the more wildly
-raged the mob of manufacturers. They managed, in fact, to intimidate the government to such an
-extent that in 1835 it proposed to lower the limit of the age of childhood from 13 to 12. In the
-meantime the pressure from without grew more threatening. Courage failed the House of
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-Commons. It refused to throw children of 13 under the Juggernaut Car of capital for more than 8
-hours a day, and the Act of 1833 came into full operation. It remained unaltered until June, 1844.
-In the ten years during which it regulated factory work, first in part, and then entirely, the official
-reports of the factory inspectors teem with complaints as to the impossibility of putting the Act
-into force. As the law of 1833 left it optional with the lords of capital during the 15 hours, from
-5.30 a.m. to 8.30 p.m., to make every “young person,” and every “child” begin, break off,
-resume, or end his 12 or 8 hours at any moment they liked, and also permitted them to assign to
-different persons, different times for meals, these gentlemen soon discovered a new “system of
-relays,” by which the labour-horses were not changed at fixed stations, but were constantly re-
-harnessed at changing stations. We do not pause longer on the beauty of this system, as we shall
-have to return to it later. But this much is clear at the first glance: that this system annulled the
-whole Factory Act, not only in the spirit, but in the letter. How could factory inspectors, with this
-complex bookkeeping in respect to each individual child or young person, enforce the legally
-determined work-time and the granting of the legal mealtimes? In a great many of the factories,
-the old brutalities soon blossomed out again unpunished. In an interview with the Home Secretary
-(1844), the factory inspectors demonstrated the impossibility of any control under the newly
-invented relay system.102 In the meantime, however, circumstances had greatly changed. The
-factory hands, especially since 1838, had made the Ten Hours’ Bill their economic, as they had
-made the Charter their political, election-cry. Some of the manufacturers, even, who had managed
-their factories in conformity with the Act of 1833, overwhelmed Parliament with memorials on
-the immoral competition of their false brethren whom greater impudence, or more fortunate local
-circumstances, enabled to break the law. Moreover, however much the individual manufacturer
-might give the rein to his old lust for gain, the spokesmen and political leaders of the
-manufacturing class ordered a change of front and of speech towards the workpeople. They had
-entered upon the contest for the repeal of the Corn Laws, and needed the workers to help them to
-victory. They promised therefore, not only a double-sized loaf of bread, but the enactment of the
-Ten Hours’ Bill in the Free-trade millennium.103 Thus they still less dared to oppose a measure
-intended only to make the law of 1833 a reality. Threatened in their holiest interest, the rent of
-land, the Tories thundered with philanthropic indignation against the “nefarious practices”104 of
-their foes.
-This was the origin of the additional Factory Act of June 7th, 1844. It came into effect on
-September 10th, 1844. It places under protection a new category of workers, viz., the women over
-18. They were placed in every respect on the same footing as the young persons, their work time
-limited to twelve hours, their night-labour forbidden, &c. For the first time, legislation saw itself
-compelled to control directly and officially the labour of adults. In the Factory Report of 1844-
-1845, it is said with irony:
-“No instances have come to my knowledge of adult women having expressed any
-regret at their rights being thus far interfered with.” 105 The working-time of
-children under 13 was reduced to 6½, and in certain circumstances to 7 hours a-
-day.106
-To get rid of the abuses of the “spurious relay system,” the law established besides others the
-following important regulations: –
-“That the hours of work of children and young persons shall be reckoned from the
-time when any child or young person shall begin to work in the morning.”
-So that if A, e.g., begins work at 8 in the morning, and B at 10, B’s work-day must nevertheless
-end at the same hour as A’s. “The time shall be regulated by a public clock,” for example, the
-nearest railway clock, by which the factory clock is to be set. The occupier is to hang up a
-187 Chapter 10
-“legible” printed notice stating the hours for the beginning and ending of work and the times
-allowed for the several meals. Children beginning work before 12 noon may not be again
-employed after 1 p.m. The afternoon shift must therefore consist of other children than those
-employed in the morning. Of the hour and a half for meal-times,
-“one hour thereof at the least shall be given before three of the clock in the
-afternoon ... and at the same period of the day. No child or young person shall be
-employed more than five hours before 1 p.m. without an interval for meal-time of
-at least 30 minutes. No child or young person [or female] shall be employed or
-allowed to remain in any room in which any manufacturing process is then [i.e., at
-mealtimes] carried on,” &c.
-It has been seen that these minutiae, which, with military uniformity, regulate by stroke of the
-clock the times, limits, pauses of the work were not at all the products of Parliamentary fancy.
-They developed gradually out of circumstances as natural laws of the modern mode of
-production. Their formulation, official recognition, and proclamation by the State, were the result
-of a long struggle of classes. One of their first consequences was that in practice the working day
-of the adult males in factories became subject to the same limitations, since in most processes of
-production the co-operation of the children. young persons, and women is indispensable. On the
-whole, therefore, during the period from 1844 to 1847, the 12 hours’ working day became general
-and uniform in all branches of industry under the Factory Act.
-The manufacturers, however, did not allow this “progress” without a compensating
-“retrogression.” At their instigation the House of Commons reduced the minimum age for
-exploitable children from 9 to 8, in order to assure that additional supply of factory children
-which is due to capitalists, according to divine and human law.107
-The years 1846-47 are epoch-making in the economic history of England. The Repeal of the Corn
-Laws, and of the duties on cotton and other raw material; Free-trade proclaimed as the guiding
-star of legislation; in a word, the arrival of the millennium. On the other hand, in the same years,
-the Chartist movement and the 10 hours’ agitation reached their highest point. They found allies
-in the Tories panting for revenge. Despite the fanatical opposition of the army of perjured Free-
-traders, with Bright and Cobden at their head, the Ten Hours’ Bill, struggled for so long, went
-through Parliament.
-The new Factory Act of June 8th, 1847, enacted that on July 1st, 1847, there should be a
-preliminary shortening of the working day for “young persons” (from 13 to 18), and all females
-to 11 hours, but that on May 1st, 1848, there should be a definite limitation of the working day to
-10 hours. In other respects, the Act only amended and completed the Acts of 1833 and 1844.
-Capital now entered upon a preliminary campaign in order to hinder the Act from coming into
-full force on May 1st, 1848. And the workers themselves, under the presence that they had been
-taught by experience, were to help in the destruction of their own work. The moment was cleverly
-chosen.
-“It must be remembered, too, that there has been more than two years of great
-suffering (in consequence of the terrible crisis of 1846-47) among the factory
-operatives, from many mills having worked short time, and many being altogether
-closed. A considerable number of the operatives must therefore be in very narrow
-circumstances many, it is to be feared, in debt; so that it might fairly have been
-presumed that at the present time they would prefer working the longer time, in
-order to make up for past losses, perhaps to pay off debts, or get their furniture out
-188 Chapter 10
-of pawn, or replace that sold, or to get a new supply of clothes for themselves and
-their families.”108
-The manufacturers tried to aggravate the natural effect of these circumstances by a general
-reduction of wages by 10%. This was done so to say, to celebrate the inauguration of the new
-Free-trade era. Then followed a further reduction of 8 1/3% as soon as the working day was
-shortened to 11, and a reduction of double that amount as soon as it was finally shortened to 10
-hours. Wherever, therefore, circumstances allowed it, a reduction of wages of at least 25% took
-place.109 Under such favourably prepared conditions the agitation among the factory workers for
-the repeal of the Act of 1847 was begun. Neither lies, bribery, nor threats were spared in this
-attempt. But all was in vain. Concerning the half-dozen petitions in which workpeople were made
-to complain of “their oppression by the Act,” the petitioners themselves declared under oral
-examination, that their signatures had been extorted from them. “They felt themselves oppressed,
-but not exactly by the Factory Act.”110 But if the manufacturers did not succeed in making the
-workpeople speak as they wished, they themselves shrieked all the louder in press and Parliament
-in the name of the workpeople. They denounced the Factory Inspectors as a kind of revolutionary
-commissioners like those of the French National Convention ruthlessly sacrificing the unhappy
-factory workers to their humanitarian crotchet. This manoeuvre also failed. Factory Inspector
-Leonard Horner conducted in his own person, and through his sub-inspectors, many examinations
-of witnesses in the factories of Lancashire. About 70% of the workpeople examined declared in
-favour of 10 hours, a much smaller percentage in favour of 11, and an altogether insignificant
-minority for the old 12 hours.111
-Another “friendly” dodge was to make the adult males work 12 to 15 hours, and then to blazon
-abroad this fact as the best proof of what the proletariat desired in its heart of hearts. But the
-“ruthless” Factory Inspector Leonard Horner was again to the fore. The majority of the “over-
-times” declared:
-“They would much prefer working ten hours for less wages, but that they had no
-choice; that so many were out of employment (so many spinners getting very low
-wages by having to work as piecers, being unable to do better), that if they refused
-to work the longer time, others would immediately get their places, so that it was a
-question with them of agreeing to work the longer time, or of being thrown out of
-employment altogether.”112
-The preliminary campaign of capital thus came to grief, and the Ten Hours’ Act came into force
-May 1st, 1848. But meanwhile the fiasco of the Chartist party whose leaders were imprisoned,
-and whose organisation was dismembered, had shaken the confidence of the English working-
-class in its own strength. Soon after this the June insurrection in Paris and its bloody suppression
-united, in England as on the Continent, all fractions of the ruling classes, landlords and capitalists,
-stock-exchange wolves and shop-keepers, Protectionists and Freetraders, government and
-opposition, priests and freethinkers, young whores and old nuns, under the common cry for the
-salvation of Property, Religion, the Family and Society. The working-class was everywhere
-proclaimed, placed under a ban, under a virtual law of suspects. The manufacturers had no need
-any longer to restrain themselves. They broke out in open revolt not only against the Ten Hours’
-Act, but against the whole of the legislation that since 1833 had aimed at restricting in some
-measure the “free” exploitation of labour-power. It was a pro-slavery rebellion in miniature,
-carried on for over two years with a cynical recklessness, a terrorist energy all the cheaper
-because the rebel capitalist risked nothing except the skin of his “hands.”
-To understand that which follows we must remember that the Factory Acts of 1833, 1844, and
-1847 were all three in force so far as the one did not amend the other: that not one of these limited
-189 Chapter 10
-the working day of the male worker over 18, and that since 1833 the 15 hours from 5.30 a.m. to
-8.30 p.m. had remained the legal “day,” within the limits of which at first the 12, and later the 10
-hours’ labour of young persons and women had to be performed under the prescribed conditions.
-The manufacturers began by here and there discharging a part of, in many cases half of the young
-persons and women employed by them, and then, for the adult males, restoring the almost
-obsolete night-work. The Ten Hours’ Act, they cried, leaves no other alternative.113
-Their second step dealt with the legal pauses for meals. Let us hear the Factory Inspectors.
-“Since the restriction of the hours of work to ten, the factory occupiers maintain,
-although they have not yet practically gone the whole length, that supposing the
-hours of work to be from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. they fulfil the provisions of the statutes
-by allowing an hour before 9 a.m. and half an hour after 7 p.m. [for meals]. In
-some cases they now allow an hour, or half an hour for dinner, insisting at the
-same time, that they are not bound to allow any part of the hour and a half in the
-course of the factory working day.”114 The manufacturers maintained therefore
-that the scrupulously strict provisions of the Act of 1844 with regard to meal-
-times only gave the operatives permission to eat and drink before coming into,
-and after leaving the factory – i.e., at home. And why should not the workpeople
-eat their dinner before 9 in the morning? The crown lawyers, however, decided
-that the prescribed meal-times
-“must be in the interval during the working-hours, and that it will not be lawful to
-work for 10 hours continuously, from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m., without any interval.”115
-After these pleasant demonstrations, Capital preluded its revolt by a step which agreed with the
-letter of the law of 1844, and was therefore legal.
-The Act of 1844 certainly prohibited the employment after 1 p.m. of such children, from 8 to 13,
-as had been employed before noon. But it did not regulate in any way the 6½ hours’ work of the
-children whose work-time began at 12 midday or later. Children of 8 might, if they began work at
-noon, be employed from 12 to 1, 1 hour; from 2 to 4 in the afternoon, 2 hours; from 5 to 8.30 in
-the evening, 3½ hours; in all, the legal 6½ hours. Or better still. In order to make their work
-coincide with that of the adult male labourers up to 8.30 p.m., the manufacturers only had to give
-them no work till 2 in the afternoon, they could then keep them in the factory without
-intermission till 8.30 in the evening.
-“And it is now expressly admitted that the practice exists in England from the
-desire of mill-owners to have their machinery at work for more than 10 hours a-
-day, to keep the children at work with male adults after all the young persons and
-women have left, and until 8.30 p.m. if the factory-owners choose.”116
-Workmen and factory inspectors protested on hygienic and moral grounds, but Capital answered:
-“My deeds upon my head! I crave the law,
-The penalty and forfeit of my bond.”
-In fact, according to statistics laid before the House of Commons on July 26th, 1850, in spite of
-all protests, on July 15th, 1850, 3,742 children were subjected to this “practice” in 257
-factories.117 Still, this was not enough. The Lynx eye of Capital discovered that the Act of 1844
-did not allow 5 hours’ work before mid-day without a pause of at least 30 minutes for
-refreshment, but prescribed nothing of the kind for work after mid-day. Therefore, it claimed and
-obtained the enjoyment not only of making children of 8 drudge without intermission from 2 to
-8.30 p.m., but also of making them hunger during that time.
-190 Chapter 10
-“Ay, his breast.
-So says the bond.”
-This Shylock-clinging118 to the letter of the law of 1844, so far as it regulated children’s labour,
-was but to lead up to an open revolt against the same law, so far as it regulated the labour of
-“young persons and women.” It will be remembered that the abolition of the “false relay system”
-was the chief aim and object of that law. The masters began their revolt with the simple
-declaration that the sections of the Act of 1844 which prohibited the ad libitum use of young
-persons and women in such short fractions of the day of 15 hours as the employer chose, were
-“comparatively harmless” so long as the work-time was fixed at 12 hours. But under the Ten
-Hours’ Act they were a “grievous hardship.” 119 They informed the inspectors in the coolest
-manner that they should place themselves above the letter of the law, and re-introduce the old
-system on their own account.120 They were acting in the interests of the ill-advised operatives
-themselves, “in order to be able to pay them higher wages.”
-"This was the only possible plan by which to maintain, under the Ten Hours’ Act,
-the industrial supremacy of Great Britain.” “Perhaps it may be a little difficult to
-detect irregularities under the relay system; but what of that? Is the great
-manufacturing interest of this country to be treated as a secondary matter in order
-to save some little trouble to Inspectors and Sub-Inspectors of Factories?” 121
-All these shifts naturally were of no avail. The Factory Inspectors appealed to the Law Courts.
-But soon such a cloud of dust in the way of petitions from the masters overwhelmed the Home
-Secretary, Sir George Grey, that in a circular of August 5th, 1848, he recommends the inspectors
-not
-“to lay informations against mill-owners for a breach of the letter of the Act, or
-for employment of young persons by relays in cases in which there is no reason to
-believe that such young persons have been actually employed for a longer period
-than that sanctioned by law.” Hereupon, Factory Inspector J. Stuart allowed the
-so-called relay system during the 15 hours of the factory day throughout Scotland,
-where it soon flourished again as of old. The English Factory Inspectors, on the
-other hand, declared that the Home Secretary had no power dictatorially to
-suspend the law, and continued their legal proceedings against the pro-slavery
-rebellion.
-But what was the good of summoning the capitalists when the Courts in this case the country
-magistrates – Cobbett’s “Great Unpaid” – acquitted them? In these tribunals, the masters sat in
-judgment on themselves An example. One Eskrigge, cotton-spinner, of the firm of Kershaw,
-Leese, & Co., had laid before the Factory Inspector of his district the scheme of a relay system
-intended for his mill. Receiving a refusal, he at first kept quiet. A few months later, an individual
-named Robinson, also a cotton-spinner, and if not his Man Friday, at all events related to
-Eskrigge, appeared before the borough magistrates of Stockport on a charge of introducing the
-identical plan of relays invented by Eskrigge. Four Justices sat, among them three cottonspinners,
-at their head this same inevitable Eskrigge. Eskrigge acquitted Robinson, and now was of opinion
-that what was right for Robinson was fair for Eskrigge. Supported by his own legal decision, he
-introduced the system at once into his own factory.122 Of course, the composition of this tribunal
-was in itself a violation of the law.123
-These judicial farces, exclaims Inspector Howell, “urgently call for a remedy –
-either that the law should be so altered as to be made to conform to these
-decisions, or that it should be administered by a less fallible tribunal, whose
-191 Chapter 10
-decisions would conform to the law ... when these cases are brought forward. I
-long for a stipendiary magistrate.”124
-The crown lawyers declared the masters’ interpretation of the Act of 1848 absurd. But the
-Saviours of Society would not allow themselves to be turned from their purpose. Leonard Horner
-reports,
-“Having endeavoured to enforce the Act ... by ten prosecutions in seven
-magisterial divisions, and having been supported by the magistrates in one case
-only ... I considered it useless to prosecute more for this evasion of the law. That
-part of the Act of 1848 which was framed for securing uniformity in the hours of
-work, ... is thus no longer in force in my district (Lancashire). Neither have the
-sub-inspectors or myself any means of satisfying ourselves, when we inspect a
-mill working by shifts, that the young persons and women are not working more
-than 10 hours a-day.... In a return of the 30th April, ... of millowners working by
-shifts, the number amounts to 114, and has been for some time rapidly increasing.
-In general, the time of working the mill is extended to 13½ hours’ from 6 a.m. to
-7½ p.m., .... in some instances it amounts to 15 hours, from 5½ a.m. to 8½
-p.m.”125
-Already, in December, 1848, Leonard Horner had a list of 65 manufacturers and 29 overlookers
-who unanimously declared that no system of supervision could, under this relay system, prevent
-enormous over-work.126 Now, the same children and young persons were shifted from the
-spinning-room to the weaving-room, now, during 15 hours, from one factory to another. 127 How
-was it possible to control a system which,
-“under the guise of relays, is some one of the many plans for shuffling ‘the hands’
-about in endless variety, and shifting the hours of work and of rest for different
-individuals throughout the day, so that you may never have one complete set of
-hands working together in the same room at the same time.”128
-But altogether independently of actual over-work, this so-called relay system was an offspring of
-capitalistic fantasy, such as Fourier, in his humorous sketches of “Courses Seances,” has never
-surpassed, except that the “attraction of labour” was changed into the attraction of capital. Look,
-for example, at those schemes of the masters which the “respectable” press praised as models of
-“what a reasonable degree of care and method can accomplish.” The personnel of the workpeople
-was sometimes divided into from 12 to 14 categories, which themselves constantly changed and
-recharged their constituent parts. During the 15 hours of the factory day, capital dragged in the
-labourer now for 30 minutes, now for an hour, and then pushed him out again, to drag him into
-the factory and to thrust him out afresh, hounding him hither and thither, in scattered shreds of
-time, without ever losing hold of him until the full 10 hours’ work was done. As on the stage, the
-same persons had to appear in turns in the different scenes of the different acts. But as an actor
-during the whole course of the play belongs to the stage, so the operatives, during 15 hours,
-belonged to the factory, without reckoning the time for going and coming. Thus the hours of rest
-were turned into hours of enforced idleness, which drove the youths to the pot-house, and the
-girls to the brothel. At every new trick that the capitalist, from day to day, hit upon for keeping
-his machinery going 12 or 15 hours without increasing the number of his hands, the worker had to
-swallow his meals now in this fragment of time, now in that. At the time of the 10 hours’
-agitation, the masters cried out that the working mob petitioned in the hope of obtaining 12 hours’
-wages for 10 hours’ work. Now they reversed the medal. They paid 10 hours’ wages for 12 or 15
-hours’ lordship over labour-power.129 This was the gist of the matter, this the masters’
-interpretation of the 10 hours’ law! These were the same unctuous Free-traders, perspiring with
-192 Chapter 10
-the love of humanity, who for full 10 years, during the Anti-Corn Law agitation, had preached to
-the operatives, by a reckoning of pounds, shillings, and pence, that with free importation of corn,
-and with the means possessed by English industry, 10 hours’ labour would be quite enough to
-enrich the capitalists.130 This revolt of capital, after two years was at last crowned with victory by
-a decision of one of the four highest Courts of Justice in England, the Court of Exchequer, which
-in a case brought before it on February 8th, 1850, decided that the manufacturers were certainly
-acting against the sense of the Act of 1844, but that this Act itself contained certain words that
-rendered it meaningless. “By this decision, the Ten Hours’ Act was abolished.”131 A crowd of
-masters, who until then had been afraid of using the relay system for young persons and women,
-now took it up heart and soul.132
-But on this apparently decisive victory of capital, followed at once a revulsion. The workpeople
-had hitherto offered a passive, although inflexible and unremitting resistance. They now protested
-in Lancashire and Yorkshire in threatening meetings. The pretended Ten Hours’ Act was thus
-simple humbug, parliamentary cheating, had never existed! The Factory Inspectors urgently
-warned the Government that the antagonism of classes had arrived at an incredible tension. Some
-of the masters themselves murmured:
-“On account of the contradictory decisions of the magistrates, a condition of
-things altogether abnormal and anarchical obtains. One law holds in Yorkshire,
-another in Lancashire, one law in one parish of Lancashire, another in its
-immediate neighbourhood. The manufacturer in large towns could evade the law,
-the manufacturer in country districts could not find the people necessary for the
-relay system, still less for the shifting of hands from one factory to another,” &c.
-And the first birthright of capital is equal exploitation of labour-power by all capitalists.
-Under these circumstances a compromise between masters and men was effected that received
-the seal of Parliament in the additional Factory Act of August 5th, 1850. The working day for
-“young persons and women,” was raised from 10 to 10½ hours for the first five days of the week,
-and shortened to 7½ on the Saturday. The work was to go on between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m.133, with
-pauses of not less than 1½ hours for meal-times, these meal-times to be allowed at one and the
-same time for all, and conformably to the conditions of 1844. By this an end was put to the relay
-system once for all.134 For children’s labour, the Act of 1844 remained in force.
-One set of masters, this time as before, secured to itself special seigneurial rights over the
-children of the proletariat. These were the silk manufacturers. In 1833 they had howled out in
-threatening fashion, “if the liberty of working children of any age for 10 hours a day were taken
-away, it would stop their works.”135 It would be impossible for them to buy a sufficient number of
-children over 13. They extorted the privilege they desired. The pretext was shown on subsequent
-investigation to be a deliberate lie.136 It did not, however, prevent them, during 10 years, from
-spinning silk 10 hours a day out of the blood of little children who had to be placed upon stools
-for the performance of their work.137 The Act of 1844 certainly “robbed” them of the “liberty” of
-employing children under 11 longer than 6½ hours a day. But it secured to them, on the other
-hand, the privilege of working children between 11 and 13, 10 hours a day, and of annulling in
-their case the education made compulsory for all other factory children. This time the pretext was
-“the delicate texture of the fabric in which they were employed, requiring a
-lightness of touch, only to be acquired by their early introduction to these
-factories.” 138
-The children were slaughtered out-and-out for the sake of their delicate fingers, as in Southern
-Russia the horned cattle for the sake of their hide and tallow. At length, in 1850, the privilege
-193 Chapter 10
-granted in 1844, was limited to the departments of silk-twisting and silk-winding. But here, to
-make amends to capital bereft of its “freedom,” the work-time for children from 11 to 13 was
-raised from 10 to 10½ hours. Pretext: “Labour in silk mills was lighter than in mills for other
-fabrics, and less likely in other respects also to be prejudicial to health.”139 Official medical
-inquiries proved afterwards that, on the contrary,
-“the average death-rate is exceedingly high in the silk districts and amongst the
-female part of the population is higher even than it is in the cotton districts of
-Lancashire.”140
-Despite the protests of the Factory Inspector, renewed every 6 months, the mischief continues to
-this hour. 141
-The Act of 1850 changed the 15 hours’ time from 6 a.m. to 8.30 p.m., into the 12 hours from 6
-a.m. to 6 p.m. for “young persons and women” only. It did not, therefore, affect children who
-could always be employed for half an hour before and 2½ hours after this period, provided the
-whole of their labour did not exceed 6½ hours. Whilst the bill was under discussion, the Factory
-Inspectors laid before Parliament statistics of the infamous abuses due to this anomaly. To no
-purpose. In the background lurked the intention of screwing up, during prosperous years, the
-working day of adult males to 15 hours by the aid of the children. The experience of the three
-following years showed that such an attempt must come to grief against the resistance of the adult
-male operatives. The Act of 1850 was therefore finally completed in 1853 by forbidding the
-“employment of children in the morning before and in the evening after young persons and
-women.” Henceforth with a few exceptions the Factory Act of 1850 regulated the working day of
-all workers in the branches of industry that come under it.142 Since the passing of the first
-Factory Act half a century had elapsed.143
-Factory legislation for the first time went beyond its original sphere in the “Printworks’ Act of
-1845.” The displeasure with which capital received this new “extravagance” speaks through
-every line of the Act. It limits the working day for children from 8 to 13, and for women to 16
-hours, between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m., without any legal pause for meal-times. It allows males over
-13 to be worked at will day and night.144 It is a Parliamentary abortion.145
-However, the principle had triumphed with its victory in those great branches of industry which
-form the most characteristic creation of the modern mode of production. Their wonderful
-development from 1853 to 1860, hand-in-hand with the physical and moral regeneration of the
-factory workers, struck the most purblind. The masters from whom the legal limitation and
-regulation had been wrung step by step after a civil war of half a century, themselves referred
-ostentatiously to the contrast with the branches of exploitation still “free.” 146 The Pharisees of
-“Political Economy” now proclaimed the discernment of the necessity of a legally fixed working
-day as a characteristic new discovery of their “science.”147 It will be easily understood that after
-the factory magnates had resigned themselves and become reconciled to the inevitable, the power
-of resistance of capital gradually weakened, whilst at the same time the power of attack of the
-working-class grew with the number of its allies in the classes of society not immediately
-interested in the question. Hence the comparatively rapid advance since 1860.
-The dye-works and bleach-works all came under the Factory Act of 1850 in 1860;148 lace and
-stocking manufactures in 1861.
-In consequence of the first report of the Commission on the employment of children (1863) the
-same fate was shared by the manufacturers of all earthenwares (not merely pottery), Lucifer-
-matches, percussion caps, cartridges, carpets, fustian-cutting, and many processes included under
-the name of “finishing.” In the year 1863 bleaching in the open air149 and baking were placed
-194 Chapter 10
-under special Acts, by which, in the former, the labour of young persons and women during the
-night-time (from 8 in the evening to 6 in the morning), and in the latter, the employment of
-journeymen bakers under 18, between 9 in the evening and 5 in the morning were forbidden. We
-shall return to the later proposals of the same Commission, which threatened to deprive of their
-“freedom” all the important branches of English Industry, with the exception of agriculture,
-mines, and the means of transport.150
-Section 7: The Struggle for a Normal Working Day. Reaction
-of the English Factory Acts on Other Countries
-The reader will bear in mind that the production of surplus-value, or the extraction of surplus
-labour, is the specific end and aim, the sum and substance, of capitalist production, quite apart
-from any changes in the mode of production, which may arise from the subordination of labour to
-capital. He will remember that as far as we have at present gone only the independent labourer,
-and therefore only the labourer legally qualified to act for himself, enters as a vendor of a
-commodity into a contract with the capitalist. If, therefore, in our historical sketch, on the one
-hand, modern industry, on the other, the labour of those who are physically and legally minors,
-play important parts, the former was to us only a special department, and the latter only a
-specially striking example of labour exploitation. Without, however, anticipating the subsequent
-development of our inquiry, from the mere connexion of the historic facts before us it follows:
-First. The passion of capital for an unlimited and reckless extension of the working day, is first
-gratified in the industries earliest revolutionised by water-power, steam, and machinery, in those
-first creations of the modern mode of production, cotton, wool, flax, and silk spinning, and
-weaving. The changes in the material mode of production, and the corresponding changes in the
-social relations of the producers151 gave rise first to an extravagance beyond all bounds, and then
-in opposition to this, called forth a control on the part of Society which legally limits, regulates,
-and makes uniform the working day and its pauses. This control appears, therefore, during the
-first half of the nineteenth century simply as exceptional legislation.152 As soon as this primitive
-dominion of the new mode of production was conquered, it was found that, in the meantime, not
-only had many other branches of production been made to adopt the same factory system, but that
-manufactures with more or less obsolete methods, such as potteries, glass-making, &c., that old-
-fashioned handicrafts, like baking, and, finally, even that the so-called domestic industries, such
-as nail-making,153 had long since fallen as completely under capitalist exploitation as the factories
-themselves. Legislation was, therefore, compelled to gradually get rid of its exceptional character,
-or where, as in England, it proceeds after the manner of the Roman Casuists, to declare any house
-in which work was done to be a factory.154
-Second. The history of the regulation of the working day in certain branches of production, and
-the struggle still going on in others in regard to this regulation, prove conclusively that the
-isolated labourer, the labourer as “free” vendor of his labour-power, when capitalist production
-has once attained a certain stage, succumbs without any power of resistance. The creation of a
-normal working day is, therefore, the product of a protracted civil war, more or less dissembled,
-between the capitalist class and the working-class. As the contest takes place in the arena of
-modern industry, it first breaks out in the home of that industry – England.155 The English factory
-workers were the champions, not only of the English, but of the modern working-class generally,
-as their theorists were the first to throw down the gauntlet to the theory of capital.156 Hence, the
-philosopher of the Factory, Ure, denounces as an ineffable disgrace to the English working-class
-195 Chapter 10
-that they inscribed “the slavery of the Factory Acts” on the banner which they bore against
-capital, manfully striving for “perfect freedom of labour.”157
-France limps slowly behind England. The February revolution was necessary to bring into the
-world the 12 hours’ law,158 which is much more deficient than its English original. For all that,
-the French revolutionary method has its special advantages. It once for all commands the same
-limit to the working day in all shops and factories without distinction, whilst English legislation
-reluctantly yields to the pressure of circumstances, now on this point, now on that, and is getting
-lost in a hopelessly bewildering tangle of contradictory enactments.159 On the other hand, the
-French law proclaims as a principle that which in England was only won in the name of children,
-minors, and women, and has been only recently for the first time claimed as a general right.160
-In the United States of North America, every independent movement of the workers was
-paralysed so long as slavery disfigured a part of the Republic. Labour cannot emancipate itself in
-the white skin where in the black it is branded. But out of the death of slavery a new life at once
-arose. The first fruit of the Civil War was the eight hours’ agitation, that ran with the seven-
-leagued boots of the locomotive from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from New England to California.
-The General Congress of labour at Baltimore (August 16th, 1866) declared:
-“The first and great necessity of the present, to free the labour of this country from
-capitalistic slavery, is the passing of a law by which eight hours shall be the
-normal working day in all States of the American Union. We are resolved to put
-forth all our strength until this glorious result is attained.”161
-At the same time, the Congress of the International Working Men’s Association at Geneva, on the
-proposition of the London General Council, resolved that “the limitation of the working day is a
-preliminary condition without which all further attempts at improvement and emancipation must
-prove abortive... the Congress proposes eight hours as the legal limit of the working day.”
-Thus the movement of the working-class on both sides of the Atlantic, that had grown
-instinctively out of the conditions of production themselves, endorsed the words of the English
-Factory Inspector, R. J. Saunders
-“Further steps towards a reformation of society can never be carried out with any
-hope of success, unless the hours of labour be limited, and the prescribed limit
-strictly enforced.”162
-It must be acknowledged that our labourer comes out of the process of production other than he
-entered. In the market he stood as owner of the commodity “labour-power” face to face with
-other owners of commodities, dealer against dealer. The contract by which he sold to the
-capitalist his labour-power proved, so to say, in black and white that he disposed of himself
-freely. The bargain concluded, it is discovered that he was no “free agent,” that the time for which
-he is free to sell his labour-power is the time for which he is forced to sell it,163 that in fact the
-vampire will not lose its hold on him “so long as there is a muscle, a nerve, a drop of blood to be
-exploited.”164 For “protection” against “the serpent of their agonies,” the labourers must put their
-heads together, and, as a class, compel the passing of a law, an all-powerful social barrier that
-shall prevent the very workers from selling. by voluntary contract with capital, themselves and
-their families into slavery and death.165 In place of the pompous catalogue of the “inalienable
-rights of man” comes the modest Magna Charta of a legally limited working day, which shall
-make clear “when the time which the worker sells is ended, and when his own begins.” Quantum
-mutatus ab illo! [What a great change from that time! – Virgil]166
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-1 “A day’s labour is vague, it may be long or short.” (“An Essay on Trade and Commerce, Containing
-Observations on Taxes, &c.” London. 1770, p. 73.)
-2 This question is far more important than the celebrated question of Sir Robert Peel to the
-Birmingham Chamber of Commerce: What is a pound? A question that could only have been
-proposed, because Peel was as much in the dark as to the nature of money as the “little shilling men”
-of Birmingham.
-3 “It is the aim of the capitalist to obtain with his expended capital the greatest possible quantity of
-labour (d’obtenir du capital dépense la plus forte somme de travail possible).” J. G. Courcelle-Seneuil.
-“Traité théorique et pratique des entreprises industrielles.” 2nd ed. Paris, 1857, p. 63.
-4 “An hour’s labour lost in a day is a prodigious injury to a commercial State.... There is a very great
-consumption of luxuries among the labouring poor of this kingdom: particularly among the
-manufacturing populace, by which they also consume their time, the most fatal of consumptions.” “An
-Essay on Trade and Commerce, &c.,” p. 47, and 15
-5 “Si le manouvrier libre prend un instant de repos, l’économie sordide qui le suit des yeux avec
-inquiétude, prétend qu’il la vole.” [If the free labourer allows himself an instant of rest, the base and
-petty management, which follows him with wary eyes, claims he is stealing from it.] N. Linguet,
-“Théorie des Lois Civiles. &c.” London, 1767, t. II., p. 466.
-6 During the great strike of the London builders, 1860-61, for the reduction of the working day to 9
-hours, their Committee published a manifesto that contained, to some extent, the plea of our worker.
-The manifesto alludes, not without irony, to the fact, that the greatest profit-monger amongst the
-building masters, a certain Sir M. Peto, was in the odour of sanctity (This same Peto, after 1867, came
-to an end a la Strousberg.)
-7 “Those who labour ... in reality feed both the pensioners ... [called the rich] and themselves.”
-(Edmund Burke, l.c., p. 2.)
-8 Niebuhr in his “Roman History” says very naïvely: “It is evident that works like the Etruscan, which
-in their ruins astound us, pre-suppose in little (!) states lords and vassals.” Sismondi says far more to
-the purpose that “Brussels lace” pre-supposes wage-lords and wage-slaves.
-9 “One cannot see these unfortunates (in the gold mines between Egypt, Ethiopia, and Arabia) who
-cannot even have their bodies clean, or their nakedness clothed, without pitying their miserable lot.
-There is no indulgence, no forbearance for the sick, the feeble, the aged, for woman’s weakness. All
-must, forced by blows, work on until death puts an end to their sufferings and their distress.” (“Diod.
-Sic. Bibl. Hist.,” lib. 2, c. 13.)
-10 That which follows refers to the situation in the Rumanian provinces before the change effected
-since the Crimean war.
-11 This holds likewise for Germany, and especially for Prussia east of the Elbe. In the 15th century the
-German peasant was nearly everywhere a man, who, whilst subject to certain rents paid in produce
-and labour was otherwise at least practically free. The German colonists in Brandenburg, Pomerania,
-Silesia, and Eastern Prussia, were even legally acknowledged as free men. The victory of the nobility
-in the peasants’ war put an end to that. Not only were the conquered South German peasants again
-enslaved. From the middle of the 16th century the peasants of Eastern Prussia, Brandenburg,
-Pomerania, and Silesia, and soon after the free peasants of Schleswig-Holstein were degraded to the
-condition of serfs. (Maurer, Fronhöfe iv. vol., — Meitzen, “Der Boden des preussischen Staats” —
-Hanssen, “Leibeigenschaft in Schleswig-Holstein.” — F. E.)
-12 Further details are to be found in E. Regnault’s “Histoire politique et sociale des Principautés
-Danubiennes,” Paris, 1855.
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-13 “In general and within certain limits, exceeding the medium size of their kind, is evidence of the
-prosperity of organic beings. As to man, his bodily height lessens if his due growth is interfered with,
-either by physical or local conditions. In all European countries in which the conscription holds, since
-its introduction, the medium height of adult men, and generally their fitness for military service, has
-diminished. Before the revolution (1789), the minimum for the infantry in France was 165
-centimetres; in 1818 (law of March 10th), 157; by the law of March 21, 1832, 156 cm.; on the average
-in France more than half are rejected on account of deficient height or bodily weakness. The military
-standard in Saxony was in 1780, 178 cm. It is now 155. In Prussia it is 157. According to the
-statement of Dr. Meyer in the Bavarian Gazette, May 9th, 1862, the result of an average of 9 years is,
-that in Prussia out of 1,000 conscripts 716 were unfit for military service, 317 because of deficiency in
-height, and 399 because of bodily defects.... Berlin in 1858 could not provide its contingent of
-recruits, it was 156 men short.” J. von Liebig: “Die Chemie in ihrer Anwendung auf Agrikultur und
-Physiologie. 1862,” 7th Ed., vol. 1, pp. 117, 118.
-14 The history of the Factory Act of 1850 will be found in the course of this chapter.
-15 I only touch here and there on the period from the beginning of modern industry in England to
-1845. For this period I refer the reader to “Die Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England,” [Condition of
-the Working Class in England] von Friedrich Engels, Leipzig, 1845. How completely Engels
-understood the nature of the capitalist mode of production is shown by the Factory Reports, Reports
-on Mines, &c., that have appeared since 1845, and how wonderfully he painted the circumstances in
-detail is seen on the most superficial comparison of his work with the official reports of the Children’s
-Employment Commission, published 18 to 20 years later (1863-1867). These deal especially with the
-branches of industry in which the Factory Acts had not, up to 1862, been introduced, in fact are not
-yet introduced. Here, then, little or no alteration had been enforced, by authority, in the conditions
-painted by Engels. I borrow my examples chiefly from the Free-trade period after 1848, that age of
-paradise, of which the commercial travellers for the great firm of Free-trade, blatant as ignorant, tell
-such fabulous tales. For the rest England figures here in the foreground because she is the classic
-representative of capitalist production, and she alone has a continuous set of official statistics of the
-things we are considering.
-16 “Suggestions, &c. by Mr. L. Horner, Inspector of Factories,” in Factories Regulation Acts. Ordered
-by the House of Commons to be printed, 9th August, 1859, pp. 4, 5.
-17 Reports of the Inspector of Factories for the half year. October, 1856, p. 35.
-18 Reports, &c., 30th April, 1858, p. 9.
-19 Reports, &c., l.c., p. 10.
-20 Reports &c., l.c., p. 25.
-21 Reports &c., for the half year ending 30th April, 1861. See Appendix No. 2; Reports, &c., 31st
-October, 1862, pp. 7, 52, 53. The violations of the Acts became more numerous during the last half
-year 1863. Cf Reports, &c., ending 31st October, 1863, p. 7.
-22 Reports, &c., October 31st, 1860, p. 23. With what fanaticism, according to the evidence of
-manufacturers given in courts of law, their hands set themselves against every interruption in factory
-labour, the following curious circumstance shows. In the beginning of June, 1836, information
-reached the magistrates of Dewsbury (Yorkshire) that the owners of 8 large mills in the
-neighbourhood of Batley had violated the Factory Acts. Some of these gentlemen were accused of
-having kept at work 5 boys between 12 and 15 years of age, from 6 a.m. on Friday to 4 p.m. on the
-following Saturday, not allowing them any respite except for meals and one hour for sleep at
-midnight. And these children had to do this ceaseless labour of 30 hours in the “shoddyhole,” as the
-hole is called, in which the woollen rags are pulled in pieces, and where a dense atmosphere of dust,
-shreds, &c., forces even the adult workman to cover his mouth continually with handkerchiefs for the
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-protection of his lungs! The accused gentlemen affirm in lieu of taking an oath — as quakers they
-were too scrupulously religious to take an oath — that they had, in their great compassion for the
-unhappy children, allowed them four hours for sleep, but the obstinate children absolutely would not
-go to bed. The quaker gentlemen were mulcted in £20. Dryden anticipated these gentry:
-Fox full fraught in seeming sanctity,
-That feared an oath, but like the devil would lie,
-That look’d like Lent, and had the holy leer,
-And durst not sin! before he said his prayer!”
-23 Rep., 31st Oct., 1856, p. 34.
-24 l.c., p. 35.
-25 l.c., p. 48.
-26 l.c., p. 48.
-27 l.c., p. 48.
-28 l.c., p. 48.
-29 Report of the Insp. &c., 30th April 1860, p. 56.
-30 This is the official expression both in the factories and in the reports.
-31 “The cupidity of mill-owners whose cruelties in the pursuit of gain have hardly been exceeded by
-those perpetrated by the Spaniards on the conquest of America in the pursuit of gold.” John Wade,
-“History of the Middle and Working Classes,” 3rd Ed. London, 1835, p. 114. The theoretical part of
-this book, a kind of hand-book of Political Economy, is, considering the time of its publication,
-original in some parts, e.g., on commercial crises. The historical part is, to a great extent, a shameless
-plagiarism of Sir F. M. Eden’s “The State of the Poor,” London, 1797.
-32 Daily Telegraph, 17th January, 1860.
-33 Cf. F. Engels “Lage, etc.” pp. 249-51.
-34 Children’s Employment Commission. First report., etc., 1863. Evidence. pp. 16, 19, 18.
-35 Public Health, 3rd report, etc., pp. 102, 104, 105.
-36 Child. Empl. Comm. I. Report, p. 24.
-37 Children’s Employment Commission, p. 22, and xi.
-38 l.c., p. xlviii.
-39 l.c., p. liv.
-40 This is not to be taken in the same sense as our surplus labour time. These gentlemen consider 10½
-hours of labour as the normal working day, which includes of course the normal surplus labour. After
-this begins “overtime” which is paid a little better. It will be seen later that the labour expended during
-the so-called normal day is paid below its value, so that the overtime is simply a capitalist trick in
-order to extort more surplus labour, which it would still be, even if the labour-power expended during
-the normal working day were properly paid.
-41 l.c., Evidence, pp. 123, 124, 125, 140, and 54.
-42 Alum finely powdered, or mixed with salt, is a normal article of commerce bearing the significant
-name of “bakers’ stuff.”
-43 Soot is a well-known and very energetic form of carbon, and forms a manure that capitalistic
-chimney-sweeps sell to English farmers. Now in 1862 the British juryman had in a law-suit to decide
-whether soot, with which, unknown to the buyer, 90% of dust and sand are mixed, is genuine soot in
-the commercial sense or adulterated soot in the legal sense. The “amis du commerce” [friends of
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-commerce] decided it to be genuine commercial soot, and non-suited the plaintiff farmer, who had in
-addition to pay the costs of the suit.
-44 The French chemist, Chevallier, in his treatise on the “sophistications” of commodities, enumerates
-for many of the 600 or more articles which he passes in review, 10, 20, 30 different methods of
-adulteration. He adds that he does not know all the methods and does not mention all that he knows.
-He gives 6 kinds of adulteration of sugar, 9 of olive oil, 10 of butter, 12 of salt, 19 of milk, 20 of
-bread, 23 of brandy, 24 of meal, 28 of chocolate, 30 of wine, 32 of coffee, etc. Even God Almighty
-does not escape this fate. See Rouard de Card, “On the Falsifications of the materials of the
-Sacrament.” (“De la falsification des substances sacramentelles,” Paris, 1856.)
-45 “Report, &c., relative to the grievances complained of by the journeymen bakers, &c., London,
-1862,” and “Second Report, &c., London, 1863.”
-46 l.c., First Report, &c., p. vi.
-47 l.c., p. Ixxi.
-48 George Read, “The History of Baking,” London, 1848, p. 16.
-49 Report (First) &c. Evidence of the “full-priced” baker Cheeseman, p. 108.
-50 George Read, l.c. At the end of the 17th and the beginning of the 18th centuries the factors (agents)
-that crowded into every possible trade were still denounced as “public nuisances.” Thus the Grand
-Jury at the quarter session of the Justices of the Peace for the County of Somerset, addressed a
-presentment to the Lower House which, among other things, states, “that these factors of Blackwell
-Hall are a Public Nuisance and Prejudice to the Clothing Trade, and ought to be put down as a
-Nuisance.” “The Case of our English Wool., &c.,” London, 1685, pp. 6, 7.
-51 First Report, &c.
-52 Report of Committee on the Baking Trade in Ireland for 1861.
-53 l.c.
-54 Public meeting of agricultural labourers at Lasswade, near Edinburgh, January 5th, 1866. (See
-Workman’s Advocate, January 13th, 1866.) The formation since the close of 1865 of a Trades’ Union
-among the agricultural labourers at first in Scotland is a historic event. In one of the most oppressed
-agricultural districts of England, Buckinghamshire, the labourers, in March, 1867, made a great strike
-for the raising of their weekly wage from 9-10 shillings to 12 shillings. (It will be seen from the
-preceding passage that the movement of the English agricultural proletariat, entirely crushed since the
-suppression of its violent manifestations after 1830, and especially since the introduction of the new
-Poor Laws, begins again in the sixties, until it becomes finally epoch-making in 1872. I return to this
-in the 2nd volume, as well as to the Blue books that have appeared since 1867 on the position of the
-English land labourers. Addendum to the 3rd ed.)
-55 Reynolds’ Newspaper, January, 1866. — Every week this same paper has, under the sensational
-headings, “Fearful and fatal accidents,” “Appalling tragedies,” &c., a whole list of fresh railway
-catastrophes. On these an employee on the North Staffordshire line comments: “Everyone knows the
-consequences that may occur if the driver and fireman of a locomotive engine are not continually on
-the look-out. How can that be expected from a man who has been at such work for 29 or 30 hours,
-exposed to the weather, and without rest. The following is an example which is of very frequent
-occurrence: — One fireman commenced work on the Monday morning at a very early hour. When he
-had finished what is called a day’s work, he had been on duty 14 hours 50 minutes. Before he had
-time to get his tea, he was again called on for duty.... The next time he finished he had been on duty 14
-hours 25 minutes, making a total of 29 hours 15 minutes without intermission. The rest of the week’s
-work was made up as follows: — Wednesday, 15 hours; Thursday, 15 hours 35 minutes; Friday, 14½
-hours; Saturday, 14 hours 10 minutes, making a total for the week of 88 hours 30 minutes. Now, sir,
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-fancy his astonishment on being paid 6 1/4 days for the whole. Thinking it was a mistake, he applied
-to the time-keeper,... and inquired what they considered a day’s work, and was told 13 hours for a
-goods man (i.e., 78 hours).... He then asked for what he had made over and above the 78 hours per
-week, but was refused. However, he was at last told they would give him another quarter, i.e., 10d.,”
-l.c., 4th February. 1866.
-56 Cf F. Engels, l.c., pp. 253, 254.
-57 Dr. Letheby, Consulting Physician of the Board of Health, declared: “The minimum of air for each
-adult ought to be in a sleeping room 300, and in a dwelling room 500 cubic feet.” Dr. Richardson,
-Senior Physician to one of the London Hospitals: “With needlewomen of all kinds, including
-milliners, dressmakers, and ordinary seamstresses, there are three miseries — over-work, deficient air,
-and either deficient food or deficient digestion.... Needlework, in the main, ... is infinitely better
-adapted to women than to men. But the mischiefs of the trade, in the metropolis especially, are that it
-is monopolised by some twenty-six capitalists, who, under the advantages that spring from capital, can
-bring in capital to force economy out of labour. This power tells throughout the whole class. If a
-dressmaker can get a little circle of customers, such is the competition that, in her home, she must
-work to the death to hold together, and this same over-work she must of necessity inflict on any who
-may assist her. If she fail, or do not try independently, she must join an establishment, where her
-labour is not less, but where her money is safe. Placed thus, she becomes a mere slave, tossed about
-with the variations of society. Now at home, in one room, starving, or near to it, then engaged 15, 16,
-aye, even 18 hours out of the 24, in an air that is scarcely tolerable, and on food which, even if it be
-good, cannot be digested in the absence of pure air. On these victims, consumption, which is purely a
-disease of bad air, feeds.” Dr. Richardson: “Work and Over-work,” in “Social Science Review,” 18th
-July, 1863.
-58 Morning Star, 23rd June, 1863. — The Times made use of the circumstance to defend the American
-slave-owners against Bright, &c. “Very many of us think,” says a leader of July 2nd, 1863, “that,
-while we work our own young women to death, using the scourge of starvation, instead of the crack of
-the whip, as the instrument of compulsion, we have scarcely a right to hound on fire and slaughter
-against families who were born slave-owners, and who, at least, feed their slaves well, and work them
-lightly.” In the same manner, the Standard, a Tory organ, fell foul of the Rev. Newman Hall: “He
-excommunicated the slave-owners, but prays with the fine folk who, without remorse, make the
-omnibus drivers and conductors of London, &c., work 16 hours a-day for the wages of a dog.”
-Finally, spake the oracle, Thomas Carlyle, of whom I wrote, in 1850, “Zum Teufel ist der Genius, der
-Kultus ist geblieben.” [“In the cult of genius ... The cult remains,” paraphrasing Schiller] In a short
-parable, he reduces the one great event of contemporary history, the American Civil War, to this level,
-that the Peter of the North wants to break the head of the Paul of the South with all his might, because
-the Peter of the North hires his labour by the day, and the Paul of the South hires his by the life.
-(Macmillan’s Magazine. Ilias Americana in nuce. August, 1863.) Thus, the bubble of Tory sympathy
-for the urban workers — by no means for the rural — has burst at last. The sum of all is — slavery!
-59 Dr. Richardson, l.c.
-60 Children’s Employment Commission. Third Report. London, 1864, pp. iv., v., vi.
-61 “Both in Staffordshire and in South Wales young girls and women are employed on the pit banks
-and on the coke heaps, not only by day but also by night. This practice has been often noticed in
-Reports presented to Parliament, as being attended with great and notorious evils. These females
-employed with the men, hardly distinguished from them in their dress, and begrimed with dirt and
-smoke, are exposed to the deterioration of character, arising from the loss of self-respect, which can
-hardly fail to follow from their unfeminine occupation.” (l. c., 194, p. xxvi. Cf. Fourth Report (1865),
-61, p. xiii.) It is the same in glass-works.
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-62 A steel manufacturer who employs children in night-labour remarked: “It seems but natural that
-boys who work at night cannot sleep and get proper rest by day, but will be running about.” (l.c.,
-Fourth Report, 63, p. xiii.) On the importance of sunlight for the maintenance and growth of the body,
-a physician writes: “Light also acts upon the tissues of the body directly in hardening them and
-supporting their elasticity. The muscles of animals, when they are deprived of a proper amount of
-light, become soft and inelastic, the nervous power loses its tone from defective stimulation, and the
-elaboration of all growth seems to be perverted.... In the case of children, constant access to plenty of
-light during the day, and to the direct rays of the sun for a part of it, is most essential to health. Light
-assists in the elaboration of good plastic blood, and hardens the fibre after it has been laid down. It
-also acts as a stimulus upon the organs of sight, and by this means brings about more activity in the
-various cerebral functions.” Dr. W. Strange, Senior Physician of the Worcester General Hospital, from
-whose work on “Health” (1864) this passage is taken, writes in a letter to Mr. White, one of the
-commissioners: “I have had opportunities formerly, when in Lancashire, of observing the effects of
-nightwork upon children, and I have no hesitation in saying, contrary to what some employers were
-fond of asserting, those children who were subjected to it soon suffered in their health.” (l.c., 284., p.
-55.) That such a question should furnish the material of serious controversy, shows plainly how
-capitalist production acts on the brain-functions of capitalists and their retainers.
-63 l.c., 57, p. xii.
-64 l.c.. Fourth Report (1865). 58. p. xii.
-65 l.c.
-66 l.c., p. xiii. The degree of culture of these “labour-powers” must naturally be such as appears in the
-following dialogues with one of the commissioners: Jeremiah Haynes, age 12 — “Four times four is 8;
-4 fours are 16. A king is him that has all the money and gold. We have a king (told it is a Queen), they
-call her the Princess Alexandra. Told that she married the Queen’s son. The Queen’s son is the
-Princess Alexandra. A Princess is a man.” William Turner, age 12 — “Don’t live in England. Think it
-is a country, but didn’t know before.” John Morris, age 14 — “Have heard say that God made the
-world, and that all the people was drownded but one, heard say that one was a little bird.” William
-Smith age 15 — “God made man, man made woman.” Edward Taylor, age 15 — “Do not know of
-London.” Henry Matthewman, age 17 — “Had been to chapel, but missed a good many times lately.
-One name that they preached about was Jesus Christ, but I cannot say any others, and I cannot tell
-anything about him. He was not killed, but died like other people. He was not the same as other people
-in some ways, because he was religious in some ways and others isn’t.” (l.c., p. xv.) “The devil is a
-good person. I don’t know where he lives.” “Christ was a wicked man.” “This girl spelt God as dog,
-and did not know the name of the queen.” (“Ch. Employment Comm. V. Report, 1866” p. 55, n. 278.)
-The same system obtains in the glass and paper works as in the metallurgical, already cited. In the
-paper factories, where the paper is made by machinery, night-work is the rule for all processes, except
-rag-sorting. In some cases night-work, by relays, is carried on incessantly through the whole week,
-usually from Sunday night until midnight of the following Saturday. Those who are on day-work work
-5 days of 12, and 1 day of 18 hours; those on night-work 5 nights of 12, and 1 of 6 hours in each
-week. In other cases each set works 24 hours consecutively on alternate days, one set working 6 hours
-on Monday, and 18 on Saturday to make up the 24 hours. In other cases an intermediate system
-prevails, by which all employed on the paper-making machinery work 15 or 16 hours every day in the
-week. This system, says Commissioner Lord, “seems to combine all the evils of both the 12 hours’
-and the 24 hours’ relays.” Children under 13, young persons under 18, and women, work under this
-night system. Sometimes under the 12 hours’ system they are obliged, on account of the non-
-appearance of those that ought to relieve them, to work a double turn of 24 hours. The evidence
-proves that boys and girls very often work overtime, which, not unfrequently, extends to 24 or even 36
-hours of uninterrupted toil. In the continuous and unvarying process of glazing are found girls of 12
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-who work the whole month 14 hours a day, “without any regular relief or cessation beyond 2 or, at
-most, 3 breaks of half an hour each for meals.” In some mills, where regular night-work has been
-entirely given up, over-work goes on to a terrible extent, “and that often in the dirtiest, and in the
-hottest, and in the most monotonous of the various processes.” (“Ch. Employment Comm. Report IV.,
-1865,” p. xxxviii, and xxxix.)
-67 Fourth Report, &c.. 1865, 79, p. xvi.
-68 l.c., 80. p. xvi.
-69 l.c., 82. p. xvii.
-70 In our reflecting and reasoning age a man is not worth much who cannot give a good reason for
-everything, no matter how bad or how crazy. Everything in the world that has been done wrong has
-been done wrong for the very best of reasons. (Hegel, l.c., p. 249 )
-71 l.c., 85, p. xvii. To similar tender scruples of the glass manufacturers that regular meal-times for the
-children are impossible because as a consequence a certain quantity of heat, radiated by the furnaces,
-would be “a pure loss” or “wasted,” Commissioner White makes answer. His answer is unlike that of
-Ure, Senior, &c., and their puny German plagiarists à la Roscher who are touched by the “abstinence,”
-“self-denial,” “saving,” of the capitalists in the expenditure of their gold, and by their Timur-
-Tamerlanish prodigality of human life! “A certain amount of heat beyond what is usual at present
-might also be going to waste, if meal-times were secured in these cases, but it seems likely not equal
-in money-value to the waste of animal power now going on in glass-houses throughout the kingdom
-from growing boys not having enough quiet time to eat their meals at ease, with a little rest afterwards
-for digestion.” (l.c., p. xiv.) And this in the year of progress 1865! Without considering the
-expenditure of strength in lifting and carrying, such a child, in the sheds where bottle and flint glass
-are made, walks during the performance of his work 15-20 miles in every 6 hours! And the work often
-lasts 14 or 15 hours! In many of these glass works, as in the Moscow spinning mills, the system of 6
-hours’ relays is in force. “During the working part of the week six hours is the utmost unbroken period
-ever attained at any one time for rest, and out of this has to come the time spent in coming and going
-to and from work, washing, dressing, and meals, leaving a very short period indeed for rest, and none
-for fresh air and play, unless at the expense of the sleep necessary for young boys, especially at such
-hot and fatiguing work.... Even the short sleep is obviously liable to be broken by a boy having to
-wake himself if it is night, or by the noise, if it is day.” Mr. White gives cases where a boy worked 36
-consecutive hours; others where boys of 12 drudged on until 2 in the morning, and then slept in the
-works till 5 a.m. (3 hours!) only to resume their work. “The amount of work,” say Tremenheere and
-Tufnell, who drafted the general report, “done by boys, youths, girls, and women, in the course of
-their daily or nightly spell of labour, is certainly extraordinary.” (l.c., xliii. and xliv.) Meanwhile, late
-by night, self-denying Mr. Glass-Capital, primed with port-wine, reels out of his club homeward
-droning out idiotically. “Britons never, never shall be slaves!”
-72 In England even now occasionally in rural districts a labourer is condemned to imprisonment for
-desecrating the Sabbath, by working in his front garden. The same labourer is punished for breach of
-contract if he remains away from his metal, paper, or glass works on the Sunday, even if it be from a
-religious whim. The orthodox Parliament will hear nothing of Sabbath-breaking if it occurs in the
-process of expanding capital. A memorial (August 1863), in which the London day-labourers in fish
-and poultry shops asked for the abolition of Sunday labour, states that their work lasts for the first 6
-days of the week on an average 15 hours a-day, and on Sunday 8-10 hours. From this same memorial
-we learn also that the delicate gourmands among the aristocratic hypocrites of Exeter Hall, especially
-encourage this “Sunday labour.” These “holy ones,” so zealous in cute curanda [in attending to their
-bodily pleasures], show their Christianity by the humility with which they bear the overwork, the
-privations, and the hunger of others. Obsequium ventris istis (the labourers) perniciosius est [Gluttony
-is more ruinous to their stomachs – paraphrase of Horace].
-203 Chapter 10
-73 “We have given in our previous reports the statements of several experienced manufacturers to the
-effect that over-hours ... certainly tend prematurely to exhaust the working power of the men.” (l.c.,
-64. p. xiii.)
-74 Cairnes, “The Slave Power,” pp. 110. 111.
-75 John Ward: “The Borough of Stoke-upon-Trent,” London, 1843, p. 42.
-76 Ferrand’s Speech in the House of Commons, 27th April, 1863.
-77 “Those were the very words used by the cotton manufacturers.” l.c.
-78 l.c. Mr. Villiers, despite the best of intentions on his part, was “legally” obliged to refuse the
-requests of the manufacturers. These gentlemen, however, attained their end through the obliging
-nature of the local poor law boards. Mr. A. Redgrave, Inspector of Factories, asserts that this time the
-system under which orphans and pauper children were treated “legally” as apprentices “was not
-accompanied with the old abuses” (on these “abuses” see Engels, l.c.), although in one case there
-certainly was “abuse of this system in respect to a number of girls and young women brought from the
-agricultural districts of Scotland into Lancashire and Cheshire.” Under this system the manufacturer
-entered into a contract with the workhouse authorities for a certain period. He fed, clothed and lodged
-the children, and gave them a small allowance of money. A remark of Mr. Redgrave to be quoted
-directly seems strange, especially if we consider that even among the years of prosperity of the
-English cotton trade, the year 1860 stands unparalleled, and that, besides, wages were exceptionally
-high. For this extraordinary demand for work had to contend with the depopulation of Ireland, with
-unexampled emigration from the English and Scotch agricultural districts to Australia and America,
-with an actual diminution of the population in some of the English agricultural districts, in
-consequence partly of an actual breakdown of the vital force of the labourers, partly of the already
-effected dispersion of the disposable population through the dealers in human flesh. Despite all this
-Mr. Redgrave says: “This kind of labour, however, would only be sought after when none other could
-be procured, for it is a high-priced labour. The ordinary wages of a boy of 13 would be about 4s. per
-week, but to lodge, to clothe, to feed, and to provide medical attendance and proper superintendence
-for 50 or 100 of these boys, and to set aside some remuneration for them, could not be accomplished
-for 4s. a-head per week.” (Report of the Inspector of Factories for 30th April, 1860, p. 27.) Mr.
-Redgrave forgets to tell us how the labourer himself can do all this for his children out of their 4s. a-
-week wages, when the manufacturer cannot do it for the 50 or 100 children lodged, boarded,
-superintended all together. To guard against false conclusions from the text, I ought here to remark
-that the English cotton industry, since it was placed under the Factory Act of 1850 with its regulations
-of labour-time, &c., must be regarded as the model industry of England. The English cotton operative
-is in every respect better off than his Continental companion in misery. “The Prussian factory
-operative labours at least ten hours per week more than his English competitor, and if employed at his
-own loom in his own house, his labour is not restricted to even those additional hours. (“Rep. of Insp.
-of Fact.,” 31st October, 1855, p. 103.) Redgrave, the Factory Inspector mentioned above, after the
-Industrial Exhibition in 1851, travelled on the Continent, especially in France and Germany, for the
-purpose of inquiring into the conditions of the factories. Of the Prussian operative he says: “He
-receives a remuneration sufficient to procure the simple fare, and to supply the slender comforts to
-which he has been accustomed ... he lives upon his coarse fare, and works hard, wherein his position is
-subordinate to that of the English operative.” (“Rep. of Insp. of Fact.” 31st Oct., 1855, p. 85.)
-79 The over-worked “die off with strange rapidity; but the places of those who perish are instantly
-filled, and a frequent change of persons makes no alteration in the scene.” (“England and America.”
-London, 1833, vol. I, p. 55. By E. G. Wakefield.)
-80 See “Public Health. Sixth Report of the Medical Officer of the Privy Council, 1863.” Published in
-London 1864. This report deals especially with the agricultural labourers. “Sutherland ... is commonly
-204 Chapter 10
-represented as a highly improved county ... but ... recent inquiry has discovered that even there, in
-districts once famous for fine men and gallant soldiers, the inhabitants have degenerated into a meagre
-and stunted race. In the healthiest situations, on hill sides fronting the sea, the faces of their famished
-children are as pale as they could be in the foul atmosphere of a London alley.” (W. Th. Thornton.
-“Overpopulation and its Remedy.” l.c., pp. 74, 75.) They resemble in fact the 30,000 “gallant
-Highlanders” whom Glasgow pigs together in its wynds and closes, with prostitutes and thieves.
-81 “But though the health of a population is so important a fact of the national capital, we are afraid it
-must be said that the class of employers of labour have not been the most forward to guard and cherish
-this treasure.... The consideration of the health of the operatives was forced upon the mill-owners.”
-(Times, November 5th, 1861.) “The men of the West Riding became the clothiers of mankind ... the
-health of the workpeople was sacrificed, and the race in a few generations must have degenerated. But
-a reaction set in. Lord Shaftesbury’s Bill limited the hours of children’s labour,” &c. (“Report of the
-Registrar-General,” for October 1861.)
-82 We, therefore, find, e.g., that in the beginning of 1863, 26 firms owning extensive potteries in
-Staffordshire, amongst others, Josiah Wedgwood, & Sons, petition in a memorial for “some legislative
-enactment.” Competition with other capitalists permits them no voluntary limitation of working-time
-for children, &c. “Much as we deplore the evils before mentioned, it would not be possible to prevent
-them by any scheme of agreement between the manufacturers. ... Taking all these points into
-consideration, we have come to the conviction that some legislative enactment is wanted.”
-(“Children’s Employment Comm.” Rep. I, 1863, p. 322.) Most recently a much more striking example
-offers. The rise in the price of cotton during a period of feverish activity, had induced the
-manufacturers in Blackburn to shorten, by mutual consent, the working-time in their mills during a
-certain fixed period. This period terminated about the end of November, 1871. Meanwhile, the
-wealthier manufacturers, who combined spinning with weaving, used the diminution of production
-resulting from this agreement, to extend their own business and thus to make great profits at the
-expense of the small employers. The latter thereupon turned in their extremity to the operatives, urged
-them earnestly to agitate for the 9 hours’ system, and promised contributions in money to this end.
-83 The labour Statutes, the like of which were enacted at the same time in France, the Netherlands, and
-elsewhere, were first formally repealed in England in 1813, long after the changes in methods of
-production had rendered them obsolete.
-84 “No child under 12 years of age shall be employed in any manufacturing establishment more than
-10 hours in one day.” General Statutes of Massachusetts, 63, ch. 12. (The various Statutes were passed
-between 1836 and 1858.) “Labour performed during a period of 10 hours on any day in all cotton,
-woollen, silk, paper, glass, and flax factories, or in manufactories of iron and brass, shall be
-considered a legal day’s labour. And be it enacted, that hereafter no minor engaged in any factory
-shall be holden or required to work more than 10 hours in any day,or 60 hours in any week; and that
-hereafter no minor shall be admitted as a worker under the age of 10 years in any factory within this
-State.” State of New Jersey. An Act to limit the hours of labour, &c., § 1 and 2. (Law of 18th March,
-1851.) “No minor who has attained the age of 12 years, and is under the age of 15 years, shall be
-employed in any manufacturing establishment more than 11 hours in any one day, nor before 5
-o’clock in the morning, nor after 7.30 in the evening.” (“Revised Statutes of the State of Rhode
-Island,” &c., ch. 139, § 23, 1st July, 1857.)
-85 “Sophisms of Free Trade.” 7th Ed. London, 1850, p. 205, 9th Ed., p. 253. This same Tory,
-moreover, admits that “Acts of Parliament regulating wages, but against the labourer and in favour of
-the master, lasted for the long period of 464 years. Population grew. These laws were then found, and
-really became, unnecessary and burdensome.” (l.c., p. 206.)
-86 In reference to this statute, J. Wade with truth remarks: “From the statement above (i.e., with regard
-to the statute) it appears that in 1496 the diet was considered equivalent to one-third of the income of
-205 Chapter 10
-an artificer and one-half the income of a labourer, which indicates a greater degree of independence
-among the working-classes than prevails at present; for the board, both of labourers and artificers,
-would now be reckoned at a much higher proportion of their wages.” (J. Wade, “History of the Middle
-and Working Classes,” pp. 24, 25, and 577.) The opinion that this difference is due to the difference in
-the price-relations between food and clothing then and now is refuted by the most cursory glance at
-“Chronicon Preciosum, &c.” By Bishop Fleetwood. 1st Ed., London, 1707; 2nd Ed., London, 1745.
-87 W. Petty. “Political Anatomy of Ireland, Verbum Sapienti,” 1672, Ed. 1691, p. 10.
-88 “A Discourse on the necessity of encouraging Mechanick Industry,” London, 1690, p. 13.
-Macaulay, who has falsified English history in the interests of the Whigs and the bourgeoisie, declares
-as follows: “The practice of setting children prematurely to work ... prevailed in the 17th century to an
-extent which, when compared with the extent of the manufacturing system, seems almost incredible.
-At Norwich, the chief seat of the clothing trade, a little creature of six years old was thought fit for
-labour. Several writers of that time, and among them some who were considered as eminently
-benevolent, mention with exultation the fact that in that single city, boys and girls of very tender age
-create wealth exceeding what was necessary for their own subsistence by twelve thousand pounds a
-year. The more carefully we examine the history of the past, the more reason shall we find to dissent
-from those who imagine that our age has been fruitful of new social evils.... That which is new is the
-intelligence and the humanity which remedies them.” (“History of England,” vol. 1., p. 417.)
-Macaulay might have reported further that “extremely well-disposed” amis du commerce in the 17th
-century, narrate with “exultation” how in a poorhouse in Holland a child of four was employed, and
-that this example of “vertu mise en pratique” [applied virtue] passes muster in all the humanitarian
-works, à la Macaulay, to the time of Adam Smith. It is true that with the substitution of manufacture
-for handicrafts, traces of the exploitation of children begin to appear. This exploitation existed always
-to a certain extent among peasants, and was the more developed, the heavier the yoke pressing on the
-husbandman. The tendency of capital is there unmistakably; but the facts themselves are still as
-isolated as the phenomena of two-headed children. Hence they were noted “with exultation” as
-especially worthy of remark and as wonders by the far-seeing “amis du commerce,” and recommended
-as models for their own time and for posterity. This same Scotch sycophant and fine talker, Macaulay,
-says: “We hear to-day only of retrogression and see only progress.” What eyes, and especially what
-ears!
-89 Among the accusers of the workpeople, the most angry is the anonymous author quoted in the text
-of “An Essay on Trade and Commerce, containing Observations on Taxes, &c.,” London, 1770. He
-had already dealt with this subject in his earlier work: “Considerations on Taxes.” London, 1765. On
-the same side follows Polonius Arthur Young, the unutterable statistical prattler. Among the defenders
-of the working-classes the foremost are: Jacob Vanderlint, in: “Money Answers all Things.” London,
-1734, the Rev. Nathaniel Forster, D. D., in “An Enquiry into the Causes of the Present High Price of
-Provisions,” London, 1767; Dr. Price, and especially Postlethwayt, as well in the supplement to his
-“Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce,” as in his “Great Britain’s Commercial Interest
-explained and improved.” 2nd Edition, 1755. The facts themselves are confirmed by many other
-writers of the time, among others by Josiah Tucker.
-90 Postlethwayt, l.c., “First Preliminary Discourse,” p. 14.
-91 “An Essay,” &c. He himself relates on p. 96 wherein the “happiness” of the English agricultural
-labourer already in 1770 consisted. “Their powers are always upon the stretch, they cannot live
-cheaper than they do, nor work harder.”
-92 Protestantism, by changing almost all the traditional holidays into workdays, plays an important part
-in the genesis of capital.
-206 Chapter 10
-93 “An Essay,” 4c., pp. 15, 41, 96, 97, 55, 57, 69. — Jacob Vanderlint, as early as 1734, declared that
-the secret of the out-cry of the capitalists as to the laziness of the working people was simply that they
-claimed for the same wages 6 days’ labour instead of 4.
-94 l.c., p. 242.
-95 l.c. “The French,” he says, “laugh at our enthusiastic ideas of liberty.” l.c., p. 78.
-96 “They especially objected to work beyond the 12 hours per day, because the law which fixed those
-hours, is the only good which remains to them of the legislation of the Republic.” (“Rep. of Insp. of
-Fact.”, 31 st October, 1856, p. 80.) The French Twelve Hours’ Bill of September 5th, 1850, a
-bourgeois edition of the decree of the Provisional Government of March 2nd, 1848, holds in all
-workshops without exceptions. Before this law the working day in France was without definite limit.
-It lasted in the factories 14, 15, or more hours. See “Des classes ouvrières en France, pendant l’année
-1848. Par M. Blanqui.” M. Blanqui the economist, not the Revolutionist, had been entrusted by the
-Government with an inquiry into the condition of the working-class.
-97 Belgium is the model bourgeois state in regard to the regulation of the working day. Lord Howard
-of Welden, English Plenipotentiary at Brussels, reports to the Foreign Office May 12th, 1862: “M.
-Rogier, the minister, informed me that children’s labour is limited neither by a general law nor by any
-local regulations; that the Government, during the last three years, intended in every session to
-propose a bill on the subject, but always found an insuperable obstacle in the jealous opposition to any
-legislation in contradiction with the principle of perfect freedom of labour.”
-98 “It is certainly much to be regretted that any class of persons should toil 12 hours a day, which,
-including the time for their meals and for going to and returning from their work, amounts, in fact, to
-14 of the 24 hours.... Without entering into the question of health, no one will hesitate, I think, to
-admit that, in a moral point of view, so entire an absorption of the time of the working-classes, without
-intermission, from the early age of 13, and in trades not subject to restriction, much younger, must be
-extremely prejudicial, and is an evil greatly to be deplored.... For the sake, therefore, of public morals,
-of bringing up an orderly population, and of giving the great body of the people a reasonable
-enjoyment of life, it is much to be desired that in all trades some portion of every working day should
-be reserved for rest and leisure.” (Leonard Horner in “Reports of Insp. of Fact. for 31st Dec., 1841.”)
-99 See “Judgment of Mr. J. H. Otway, Belfast. Hilary Sessions, County Antrim, 1860.”
-100 It is very characteristic of the regime of Louis Philippe, the bourgeois king, that the one Factory
-Act passed during his reign, that of March 22nd, 1841, was never put in force. And this law only dealt
-with child-labour. It fixed 8 hours a day for children between 8 and 12, 12 hours for children between
-12 and 16, &c., with many exceptions which allow night-work even for children 8 years old. The
-supervision and enforcement of this law are, in a country where every mouse is under police
-administration, left to the good-will of the amis du commerce. Only since 1853, in one single
-department — the Departement du Nord — has a paid government inspector been appointed. Not less
-characteristic of the development of French society, generally, is the fact, that Louis Philippe’s law
-stood solitary among the all-embracing mass of French laws, till the Revolution of 1848.
-101 “Report of Insp. of Fact.” 30th April, 1860, p. 50.
-102 “Rept. of Insp. of Fact.,” 31st October, 1849, p. 6
-103 “Rept. of Insp. of Fact.,” 31st October, 1848, p. 98.
-104 Leonard Horner uses the expression “nefarious practices” in his official reports. (“Report of Insp.
-of Fact.,” 31st October, 1859, p. 7.)
-105 “Rept.,” &c., 30th Sept., 1844, p. 15.
-106 The Act allows children to be employed for 10 hours if they do not work day after day, but only on
-alternate days. In the main, this clause remained inoperative.
-207 Chapter 10
-107 “As a reduction in their hours of work would cause a larger number (of children) to be employed, it
-was thought that the additional supply of children from 8 to 9 years of age would meet the increased
-demand” (l.c., p. 13 ).
-108 Rep. of Insp. of Fact.,” 31st Oct., 1848, p. 16.
-109 “I found that men who had been getting 10s. a week, had had 1s. taken off for a reduction in the
-rate of 10 per cent, and 1s. 6d. off the remaining 9s. for the reduction in time, together 2s. 6d.. and
-notwithstanding this, many of them said they would rather work 10 hours.” l.c.
-110 “‘Though I signed it [the petition], I said at the time I was putting my hand to a wrong thing.’
-‘Then why did you put your hand to it?’ ‘Because I should have been turned off if I had refused.’
-Whence it would appear that this petitioner felt himself ‘oppressed,’ but not exactly by the Factory
-Act.” l.c., p. 102.
-111 p. 17, l.c. In Mr. Horner’s district 10,270 adult male labourers were thus examined in 181 factories.
-Their evidence is to be found in the appendix to the Factory Reports for the half-year ending October
-1848. These examinations furnish valuable material in other connexions also.
-112 l.c. See the evidence collected by Leonard Horner himself, Nos. 69, 70, 71, 72, 92, 93, and that
-collected by Sub-lnspector A., Nos. 51, 52, 58, 59, 62, 70, of the Appendix. One manufacturer, too,
-tells the plain truth. See No. 14, and No. 265, l.c.
-113 Reports, &c., for 31st October, 1848, pp. 133, 134.
-114 Reports, &c., for 30th April, 1848, p. 47.
-115 Reports, &c., for 31st October, 1848, p. 130.
-116 Reports, &c., l.c., p. 142.
-117 Reports &c., for 31st October, 1850, pp. 5, 6.
-118 The nature of capital remains the same in its developed as in its undeveloped form. In the code
-which the influence of the slave-owners, shortly before the outbreak of the American Civil War,
-imposed on the territory of New Mexico, it is said that the labourer, in as much as the capitalist has
-bought his labour-power, “is his (the capitalist’s) money.” The same view was current among the
-Roman patricians. The money they had advanced to the plebeian debtor had been transformed via the
-means of subsistence into the flesh and blood of the debtor. This “flesh and blood” were, therefore,
-“their money.” Hence, the Shylock-law of the Ten Tables. Linguet’s hypothesis that the patrician
-creditors from time to time prepared, beyond the Tiber, banquets of debtors’ flesh, may remain as
-undecided as that of Daumer on the Christian Eucharist.
-119 Reports, &c.. for 30th April, 1848, p. 28.
-120 Thus, among others, Philanthropist Ashworth to Leonard Horner, in a disgusting Quaker letter.
-(Reports, &c., April, 1849, p. 4.)
-121 l.c., p. 140.
-122 Reports, &c., for 30th April, 1849, pp. 21, 22. Cf like examples ibid., pp. 4, 5.
-123 By I. and II. Will. IV., ch. 24, s. 10, known as Sir John Hobhouse’s Factory Act, it was forbidden
-to any owner of a cotton-spinning or weaving mill, or the father, son, or brother of such owner, to act
-as Justice of the Peace in any inquiries that concerned the Factory Act.
-124 l.c.
-125 Reports, &c., for 30th April, 1849, p. 5.
-126 Reports, &c., for 31st October, 1849, p. 6.
-127 Reports, &c., for 30th April, 1849, p. 21.
-128 Reports, &c., for 31st October, 1848, p. 95.
-208 Chapter 10
-129 See Reports, &c., for 30th April, 1849, p. 6, and the detailed explanation of the “shifting system,”
-by Factory Inspectors Howell and Saunders, in “Reports, &c., for 31st October, 1848.” See also the
-petition to the Queen from the clergy of Ashton and vicinity, in the spring of 1849, against the “shift
-system.”
-130 Cf. for example, “The Factory Question and the Ten Hours’ Bill.”, By R. H. Greg, 1837.
-131 F. Engels: “The English Ten Hours’ Bill.” (In the “Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Politisch-
-oekonomische Revue.” Edited by K. Marx. April number, 1850, p. 13.) The same “high” Court of
-Justice discovered, during the American Civil War, a verbal ambiguity which exactly reversed the
-meaning of the law against the arming of pirate ships.
-132 Rep., &c., for 30th April, 1850.
-133 In winter, from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. may be substituted.
-134 “The present law (of 1850) was a compromise whereby the employed surrendered the benefit of
-the Ten Hours’ Act for the advantage of one uniform period for the commencement and termination of
-the labour of those whose labour is restricted.” (Reports, &c., for 30th April, 1852, p. 14.)
-135 Reports, &c., for Sept., 1844, p. 13.
-136 l.c.
-137 l.c.
-138 “Reports, &c., for 31st Oct., 1846,” p. 20.
-139 Reports, &c., for 31st Oct., 1861, p. 26.
-140 l.c.,p. 27. On the whole the working population, subject to the Factory Act, has greatly improved
-physically. All medical testimony agrees on this point, and personal observation at different times has
-convinced me of it. Nevertheless, and exclusive of the terrible death-rate of children in the first years
-of their life, the official reports of Dr. Greenhow show the unfavourable health condition of the
-manufacturing districts as compared with “agricultural districts of normal health.” As evidence, take
-the following table from his 1861 report: —
-Pecentage of Adult Males
-Engaged in Manufactures
-14.9 42.6 37.3 41.9 31.0 14.9 36.6 30.4 —
-Death-rate from
-Pulmonary Affections per
-100,000 Males
-598 708 547 611 691 588 721 726 305
-Name of District Wigan Black
-burn
-Halifax Brad
-ford
-Maccle
-sfield
-Leek Stoke-
-upon-
-Trent
-Woolst
-anton
-8 healthy
-agricultural
-districts
-Death-rate from
-Pulmonary Affections per
-100,000 Females
-644 734 564 603 804 705 665 727 340
-Pecentage of Adult
-Females Engaged in
-Manufactures
-18.0 34.9 20.4 30.0 26.0 17.2 19.3 13.9 —
-Kind of Female
-Occupation
-Cotton Do. Wors
-ted
-Do. Silk Do. Earthen
-ware
-Do. —
-141 It is well known with what reluctance the English “Free-traders” gave up the protective duty on the
-silk manufacture. Instead of the protection against French importation, the absence of protection to
-English factory children now serves their turn.
-142 During 1859 and 1860, the zenith years of the English cotton industry, some manufacturers tried,
-by the decoy bait of higher wages for over-time, to reconcile the adult male operatives to an extension
-209 Chapter 10
-of the working day. The hand-mule spinners and self-actor mincers put an end to the experiment by a
-petition to their employers in which they say, “Plainly speaking, our lives are to us a burthen; and,
-while we are confined to the mills nearly two days a week more than the other operatives of the
-country, we feel like helots in the land, and that we are perpetuating a system injurious to ourselves
-and future generations.... This, therefore, is to give you most respectful notice that when we
-commence work again after the Christmas and New Year’s holidays, we shall work 60 hours per
-week, and no more, or from six to six, with one hour and a half out.” (Reports, &c., for 30th April,
-1860, p. 30.)
-143 On the means that the wording of this Act afforded for its violation of the Parliamentary Return
-“Factories Regulation Act” (6th August, 1859), and in it Leonard Horner’s “Suggestions for amending
-the Factory Acts to enable the Inspectors to prevent illegal working, now becoming very prevalent.”
-144 Children of the age of 8 years and upwards, have, indeed, been employed from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m.
-during the last half year in my district.” (Reports, &c., for 31st October, 1857, p. 39.)
-145 “The Printworks’ Act is admitted to be a failure both with reference to its educational and
-protective provisions.” (Reports, &c., for 31st October, 1862, p. 52.)
-146 Thus, e.g., E. Potter in a letter to the Times of March 24th, 1863. The Times reminded him of the
-maoufacturers’ revolt against the Ten Hours’ Bill.
-147 Thus, among others, Mr. W. Newmarch, collaborator and editor of Tooke’s “History of Prices.” Is
-it a scientific advance to make cowardly concessions to public opinion?
-148 The Act passed in 1860, determined that, in regard to dye and bleachworks, the working day
-should be fixed on August 1st, 1861, provisionally at 12 hours, and definitely on August 1st, 1862, at
-10 hours, i.e., at 10½ hours for ordinary days, and 7½ for Saturday. Now, when the fatal year, 1862,
-came, the old farce was repeated. Besides, the manufacturers petitioned Parliament to allow the
-employment of young persons and women for 12 hours during one year longer. “In the existing
-condition of the trade (the time of the cotton famine), it was greatly to the advantage of the operatives
-to work 12 hours per day, and make wages when they could.” A bill to this effect had been brought in,
-“and it was mainly due to the action of the operative bleachers in Scotland that the bill was
-abandoned.” (Reports, &c., for 31st October, 1862, pp. 14-15.) Thus defeated by the very workpeople,
-in whose name it pretended to speak, Capital discovered, with the help of lawyer spectacles, that the
-Act of 1860, drawn up, like all the Acts of Parliament for the “protection of labour,” in equivocal
-phrases, gave them a pretext to exclude from its working the calenderers and finishers. English
-jurisprudence, ever the faithful servant of capital, sanctioned in the Court of Common Pleas this piece
-of pettifogging. “The operatives have been greatly disappointed ... they have complained of over-
-work, and it is greatly to be regretted that the clear intention of the legislature should have failed by
-reason of a faulty definition.” (l.c., p. 18.)
-149 The “open-air bleachers” had evaded the law of 1860, by means of the lie that no women worked at
-it in the night. The lie was exposed by the Factory Inspectors, and at the same time Parliament was, by
-petitions from the operatives, bereft of its notions as to the cool meadow-fragrance, in which
-bleaching in the open-air was reported to take place. In this aerial bleaching, drying-rooms were used
-at temperatures of from 90° to 100° Fahrenheit, in which the work was done for the most part by girls.
-“Cooling” is the technical expression for their occasional escape from the drying-rooms into the fresh
-air. “Fifteen girls in stoves. Heat from 80° to 90° for linens, and 100° and upwards for cambrics.
-Twelve girls ironing and doing-up in a small room about 10 feet square, in the centre of which is a
-close stove. The girls stand round the stove, which throws out a terrific heat, and dries the cambrics
-rapidly for the ironers. The hours of work for these hands are unlimited. If busy, they work till 9 or 12
-at night for successive nights.” (Reports, &c., for 31st October, 1862, p. 56.) A medical man states:
-“No special hours are allowed for cooling, but if the temperature gets too high, or the workers’ hands
-210 Chapter 10
-get soiled from perspiration, they are allowed to go out for a few minutes.... My experience, which is
-considerable, in treating the diseases of stove workers, compels me to express the opinion that their
-sanitary condition is by no means so high as that of the operatives in a spinning factory (and Capital,
-in its memorials to Parliament, had painted them as floridly healthy after the manner of Rubens.) The
-diseases most observable amongst them are phthisis, bronchitis, irregularity of uterine functions,
-hysteria in its most aggravated forms, and rheumatism. All of these, I believe, are either directly or
-indirectly induced by the impure, overheated air of the apartments in which the hands are employed
-and the want of sufficient comfortable clothing to protect them from the cold, damp atmosphere, in
-winter, when going to their homes.” (l.c., pp. 56-57.) The Factory Inspectors remarked on the
-supplementary law of 1860, torn from these open-air bleachers: “The Act has not only failed to afford
-that protection to the workers which it appears to offer, but contains a clause ... apparently so worded
-that, unless persons are detected working after 8 o’clock at night they appear to come under no
-protective provisions at all, and if they do so work the mode of proof is so doubtful that a conviction
-can scarcely follow.” (l.c., p. 52.) “To all intents and purposes, therefore, as an Act for any benevolent
-or educational purpose, it is a failure; since it can scarcely be called benevolent to permit, which is
-tantamount to compelling, women and children to work 14 hours a day with or without meals, as the
-case may be, and perhaps for longer hours than these, without limit as to age, without reference to sex,
-and without regard to the social habits of the families of the neighbourhood, in which such works
-(bleaching and dyeing) are situated.” (Reports, &c., for 30th April, 1863, p. 40.)
-150 Note to the 2nd Ed. Since 1866, when I wrote the above passages, a reaction has again set in.
-151 “The conduct of each of these classes (capitalists and workmen) has been the result of the relative
-situation in which they have been placed.” (Reports, &c., for 31st October, 1848, p. 113.)
-152 “The employments, placed under restriction, were connected with the manufacture of textile fabrics
-by the aid of steam or water-power. There were two conditions to which an employment must be
-subject to cause it to be inspected, viz., the use of steam or waterpower, and the manufacture of certain
-specified fibre.” (Reports, &c., for 31st October, 1864, p. 8.)
-153 On the condition of so-called domestic industries, specially valuable materials are to be found in
-the latest reports of the Children’s Employment Commission.
-154 “The Acts of last Session (1864) ... embrace a diversity of occupations, the customs in which differ
-greatly, and the use of mechanical power to give motion to machinery is no longer one of the elements
-necessary, as formerly, to constitute, in legal phrase, a ‘Factory.’” (Reports, &c., for 31st Octaber,
-1864, p. 8.)
-155 Belgium, the paradise of Continental Liberalism, shows no trace of this movement. Even in the
-coal and metal mines labourers of both sexes, and all ages, are consumed, in perfect “freedom” at any
-period and through any length of time. Of every 1,000 persons employed there, 733 are men, 88
-women, 135 boys, and 44 girls under 16; in the blast furnaces, &c., of every 1,000, 668 are men, 149
-women, 98 boys, and 85 girls under 16. Add to this the low wages for the enormous exploitation of
-mature and immature labour-power. The average daily pay for a man is 2s. 8d., for a woman, 1s. 8d.,
-for a boy, 1s. 2½d. As a result, Belgium had in 1863, as compared with 1850, nearly doubled both the
-amount and the value of its exports of coal, iron, &c.
-156 Robert Owen, soon after 1810, not only maintained the necessity of a limitation of the working day
-in theory, but actually introduced the 10 hours’ day into his factory at New Lanark. This was laughed
-at as a communistic Utopia; so were his “Combination of children’s education with productive labour
-and the Co-operative Societies of Workingmen”, first called into being by him. To-day, the first
-Utopia is a Factory Act, the second figures as an official phrase in all Factory Acts, the third is already
-being used as a cloak for reactionary humbug.
-211 Chapter 10
-157 Ure: “French translation, Philosophie des Manufactures.” Paris, 1836, Vol. II, pp. 39, 40, 67, 77,
-&c.
-158 In the Compte Rendu of the International Statistical Congress at Paris, 1855, it is stated: “The
-French law, which limits the length of daily labour in factories and workshops to 12 hours, does not
-confine this work to definite fixed hours. For children’s labour only the work-time is prescribed as
-between 5 a.m. and 9 p.m. Therefore, some of the masters use the right which this fatal silence gives
-them to keep their works going, without intermission, day in, day out, possibly with the exception of
-Sunday. For this purpose they use two different sets of workers, of whom neither is in the workshop
-more than 12 hours at a time, but the work of the establishment lasts day and night. The law is
-satisfied, but is humanity?” Besides “the destructive influence of night-labour on the human
-organism,” stress is also laid upon “the fatal influence of the association of the two sexes by night in
-the same badly-lighted workshops.”
-159 “For instance, there is within my district one occupier who, within the same curtilage, is at the
-same time a bleacher and dyer under the Bleaching and Dyeing Works Act, a printer under the Print
-Works Act, and a finisher under the Factory Act.” (Report of Mr. Baker, in Reports, lic., for October
-31st, 1861, p. 20.) After enumerating the different provisions of these Acts, and the complications
-arising from them, Mr. Baker says: “It will hence appear that it must be very difficult to secure the
-execution of these three Acts of Parliament where the occupier chooses to evade the law.” But what is
-assured to the lawyers by this is law-suits.
-160 Thus the Factory Inspectors at last venture to say: “These objections (of capital to the legal
-limitation of the working day) must succumb before the broad principle of the rights of labour....
-There is a time when the master’s right in his workman’s labour ceases, and his time becomes his
-own, even if there were no exhaustion in the question.” (Reports, &c., for 31 st Oct., 1862, p. 54.)
-161 “We, the workers of Dunkirk, declare that the length of time of labour required under the present
-system is too great, and that, far from leaving the worker time for rest and education, it plunges him
-into a condition of servitude but little better than slavery. That is why we decide that 8 hours are
-enough for a working day, and ought to be legally recognised as enough; why we call to our help that
-powerful lever, the press; ... and why we shall consider all those that refuse us this help as enemies of
-the reform of labour and of the rights of the labourer.” (Resolution of the Working Men of Dunkirk,
-New York State, 1866.)
-162 Reports, &c., for Oct., 1848, p. 112.
-163 “The proceedings (the manoeuvres of capital, e.g., from 1848-50) have afforded, moreover,
-incontrovertible proof of the fallacy of the assertion so often advanced, that operatives need no
-protection, but may be considered as free agents in the disposal of the only property which they
-possess — the labour of their hands and the sweat of their brows.” (Reports, &c., for April 30th, 1850,
-p. 45.) “Free labour (if so it may be termed) even in a free country, requires the strong arm of the law
-to protect it.” (Reports, &c., for October 31st, 1864, p. 34.) “To permit, which is tantamount to
-compelling ... to work 14 hours a day with or without meals,” &c. (Repts., &c., for April 30th, 1863,
-p. 40.)
-164 Friedrich Engels, l.c., p. 5.
-165 The 10 Hours’ Act has, in the branches of industry that come under it, “put an end to the premature
-decrepitude of the former long-hour workers.” (Reports, &c., for 31st Oct., 1859, p. 47.) “Capital (in
-factories) can never be employed in keeping the machinery in motion beyond a limited time, without
-certain injury to the health and morals of the labourers employed; and they are not in a position to
-protect themselves.” (l.c., p. 8)
-166 “A still greater boon is the distinction at last made clear between the worker’s own time and his
-master’s. The worker knows now when that which he sells is ended, and when his own begins; and by
-212 Chapter 10
-possessing a sure foreknowledge of this, is enabled to prearrange his own minutes for his own
-purposes.” (l.c., p. 52.) “By making them masters of their own time (the Factory Acts) have given
-them a moral energy which is directing them to the eventual possession of political power” (l.c., p.
-47). With suppressed irony, and in very well weighed words, the Factory Inspectors hint that the
-actual law also frees the capitalist from some of the brutality natural to a man who is a mere
-embodiment of capital, and that it has given him time for a little “culture.” “Formerly the master had
-no time for anything but money; the servant had no time for anything but labour” (l.c., p. 48).
-Chapter 11: Rate and Mass of Surplus-Value
-In this chapter, as hitherto, the value of labour-power, and therefore the part of the working day
-necessary for the reproduction or maintenance of that labour-power, are supposed to be given,
-constant magnitudes.
-This premised, with the rate, the mass is at the same time given of the surplus-value that the
-individual labourer furnishes to the capitalist in a definite period of time. If, e.g., the necessary
-labour amounts to 6 hours daily, expressed in a quantum of gold = 3 shillings, then 3s. is the daily
-value of one labour-power or the value of the capital advanced in the buying of one labour-power.
-If, further, the rate of surplus-value be = 100%, this variable capital of 3s. produces a mass of
-surplus-value of 3s., or the labourer supplies daily a mass of surplus labour equal to 6 hours.
-But the variable capital of a capitalist is the expression in money of the total value of all the
-labour-powers that he employs simultaneously. Its value is, therefore, equal to the average value
-of one labour-power, multiplied by the number of labour-powers employed. With a given value of
-labour-power, therefore, the magnitude of the variable capital varies directly as the number of
-labourers employed simultaneously. If the daily value of one labour-power = 3s., then a capital of
-300s. must be advanced in order to exploit daily 100 labour-powers, of n times 3s., in order to
-exploit daily n labour-powers.
-In the same way, if a variable capital of 3s., being the daily value of one labour-power, produce a
-daily surplus-value of 3s., a variable capital of 300s. will produce a daily surplus-value of 300s.,
-and one of n times 3s. a daily surplus-value of n × 3s. The mass of the surplus-value produced is
-therefore equal to the surplus-value which the working day of one labourer supplies multiplied by
-the number of labourers employed. But as further the mass of surplus-value which a single
-labourer produces, the value of labour-power being given, is determined by the rate of the
-surplus-value, this law follows: the mass of the surplus-value produced is equal to the amount of
-the variable capital advanced, multiplied by the rate of surplus-value, in other words: it is
-determined by the compound ratio between the number of labour-powers exploited
-simultaneously by the same capitalist and the degree of exploitation of each individual labour-
-power.
-Let the mass of the surplus-value be S, the surplus-value supplied by the individual labourer in
-the average day s the variable capital daily advanced in the purchase of one individual labour-
-power v, the sum total of the variable capital V, the value of an average labour-power P, its
-degree of exploitation (a'/a) (surplus labour/necessary-labour) and the number of labourers
-employed n; we would have:
-S = { (s/v) × V
-P × (a'/a) × n
-It is always supposed, not only that the value of an average labour-power is constant, but that the
-labourers employed by a capitalist are reduced to average labourers. There are exceptional cases
-in which the surplus-value produced does not increase in proportion to the number of labourers
-exploited, but then the value of the labour-power does not remain constant.
-In the production of a definite mass of surplus-value, therefore the decrease of one factor may be
-compensated by the increase of the other. If the variable capital diminishes, and at the same time
-the rate of surplus-value increases in the same ratio, the mass of surplus-value produced remains
-214 Chapter 11
-unaltered. If on our earlier assumption the capitalist must advance 300s., in order to exploit 100
-labourers a day, and if the rate of surplus-value amounts to 50%, this variable capital of 300s.
-yields a surplus-value of 150s. or of 100 × 3 working hours. If the rate of surplus-value doubles,
-or the working day, instead of being extended from 6 to 9, is extended from 6 to 12 hours and at
-the same time variable capital is lessened by half, and reduced to 150s., it yields also a surplus-
-value of 150s. or 50 × 6 working hours. Diminution of the variable capital may therefore be
-compensated by a proportionate rise in the degree of exploitation of labour-power, or the decrease
-in the number of the labourers employed by a proportionate extension of the working day. Within
-certain limits therefore the supply of labour exploitable by capital is independent of the supply of
-labourers.1 On the contrary, a fall in the rate of surplus-value leaves unaltered the mass of the
-surplus-value produced, if the amount of the variable capital, or number of the labourers
-employed, increases in the same proportion.
-Nevertheless, the compensation of a decrease in the number of labourers employed, or of the
-amount of variable capital advanced by a rise in the rate of surplus-value, or by the lengthening of
-the working day, has impassable limits. Whatever the value of labour-power may be, whether the
-working time necessary for the maintenance of the labourer is 2 or 10 hours, the total value that a
-labourer can produce, day in, day out, is always less than the value in which 24 hours of labour
-are embodied, less than 12s., if 12s. is the money expression for 24 hours of realised labour. In
-our former assumption, according to which 6 working hours are daily necessary in order to
-reproduce the labour-power itself or to replace the value of the capital advanced in its purchase, a
-variable capital of 1,500s., that employs 500 labourers at a rate of surplus-value of 100% with a
-12 hours’ working day, produces daily a surplus-value of 1,500s. or of 6 × 500 working hours. A
-capital of 300s. that employs 100 labourers a day with a rate of surplus-value of 200% or with a
-working day of 18 hours, produces only a mass of surplus-value of 600s. or 12 × 100 working
-hours; and its total value-product, the equivalent of the variable capital advanced plus the surplus-
-value, can, day in, day out, never reach the sum of 1,200s. or 24 × 100 working hours. The
-absolute limit of the average working day – this being by nature always less than 24 hours – sets
-an absolute limit to the compensation of a reduction of variable capital by a higher rate of
-surplus-value, or of the decrease of the number of labourers exploited by a higher degree of
-exploitation of labour-power. This palpable law is of importance for the clearing up of many
-phenomena, arising from a tendency (to be worked out later on) of capital to reduce as much as
-possible the number of labourers employed by it, or its variable constituent transformed into
-labour-power, in contradiction to its other tendency to produce the greatest possible mass of
-surplus-value. On the other hand, if the mass of labour-power employed, or the amount of
-variable capital, increases, but not in proportion to the fall in the rate of surplus-value, the mass of
-the surplus-value produced, falls.
-A third law results from the determination, of the mass of the surplus-value produced, by the two
-factors: rate of surplus-value and amount of variable capital advanced. The rate of surplus-value,
-or the degree of exploitation of labour-power, and the value of labour-power, or the amount of
-necessary working time being given, it is self evident that the greater the variable capital, the
-greater would be the mass of the value produced and of the surplus-value. If the limit of the
-working day is given, and also the limit of its necessary constituent, the mass of value and
-surplus-value that an individual capitalist produces, is clearly exclusively dependent on the mass
-of labour that he sets in motion. But this, under the conditions supposed above, depends on the
-mass of labour-power, or the number of labourers whom he exploits, and this number in its turn is
-determined by the amount of the variable capital advanced. With a given rate of surplus-value,
-and a given value of labour-power, therefore, the masses of surplus-value produced vary directly
-215 Chapter 11
-as the amounts of the variable capitals advanced. Now we know that the capitalist divides his
-capital into two parts. One part he lays out in means of production. This is the constant part of his
-capital. The other part he lays out in living labour-power. This part forms his variable capital. On
-the basis of the same mode of social production, the division of capital into constant and variable
-differs in different branches of production, and within the same branch of production, too, this
-relation changes with changes in the technical conditions and in the social combinations of the
-processes of production. But in whatever proportion a given capital breaks up into a constant and
-a variable part, whether the latter is to the former as 1:2 or 1:10 or 1:x, the law just laid down is
-not affected by this. For, according to our previous analysis, the value of the constant capital
-reappears in the value of the product, but does not enter into the newly produced value, the newly
-created value product. To employ 1,000 spinners, more raw material, spindles, &c., are, of
-course, required, than to employ 100. The value of these additional means of production however
-may rise, fall, remain unaltered, be large or small; it has no influence on the process of creation of
-surplus-value by means of the labour-powers that put them in motion. The law demonstrated
-above now, therefore, takes this form: the masses of value and of surplus-value produced by
-different capitals – the value of labour-power being given and its degree of exploitation being
-equal – vary directly as the amounts of the variable constituents of these capitals, i.e., as their
-constituents transformed into living labour-power.
-This law clearly contradicts all experience based on appearance. Everyone knows that a cotton
-spinner, who, reckoning the percentage on the whole of his applied capital, employs much
-constant and little variable capital, does not, on account of this, pocket less profit or surplus-value
-than a baker, who relatively sets in motion much variable and little constant capital. For the
-solution of this apparent contradiction, many intermediate terms are as yet wanted, as from the
-standpoint of elementary algebra many intermediate terms are wanted to understand that 0/0 may
-represent an actual magnitude. Classical economy, although not formulating the law, holds
-instinctively to it, because it is a necessary consequence of the general law of value. It tries to
-rescue the law from collision with contradictory phenomena by a violent abstraction. It will be
-seen later2 how the school of Ricardo has come to grief over this stumbling block. Vulgar
-economy which, indeed, “has really learnt nothing,” here as everywhere sticks to appearances in
-opposition to the law which regulates and explains them. In opposition to Spinoza, it believes that
-“ignorance is a sufficient reason.”
-The labour which is set in motion by the total capital of a society, day in, day out, may be
-regarded as a single collective working day. If, e.g., the number of labourers is a million, and the
-average working day of a labourer is 10 hours, the social working day consists of ten million
-hours. With a given length of this working day, whether its limits are fixed physically or socially,
-the mass of surplus-value can only be increased by increasing the number of labourers, i.e., of the
-labouring population. The growth of population here forms the mathematical limit to the
-production of surplus-value by the total social capital. On the contrary, with a given amount of
-population, this limit is formed by the possible lengthening of the workingday.3 It will, however,
-be seen in the following chapter that this law only holds for the form of surplus-value dealt with
-up to the present.
-From the treatment of the production of surplus-value, so far, it follows that not every sum of
-money, or of value, is at pleasure transformable into capital. To effect this transformation, in fact,
-a certain minimum of money or of exchange-value must be presupposed in the hands of the
-individual possessor of money or commodities. The minimum of variable capital is the cost price
-of a single labour-power, employed the whole year through, day in, day out, for the production of
-surplus-value. If this labourer were in possession of his own means of production, and were
-216 Chapter 11
-satisfied to live as a labourer, he need not work beyond the time necessary for the reproduction of
-his means of subsistence, say 8 hours a day. He would, besides, only require the means of
-production sufficient for 8 working hours. The capitalist, on the other hand, who makes him do,
-besides these 8 hours, say 4 hours’ surplus labour, requires an additional sum of money for
-furnishing the additional means of production. On our supposition, however, he would have to
-employ two labourers in order to live, on the surplus-value appropriated daily, as well as, and no
-better than a labourer, i.e., to be able to satisfy his necessary wants. In this case the mere
-maintenance of life would be the end of his production, not the increase of wealth; but this latter
-is implied in capitalist production. That he may live only twice as well as an ordinary labourer,
-and besides turn half of the surplus-value produced into capital, he would have to raise, with the
-number of labourers, the minimum of the capital advanced 8 times. Of course he can, like his
-labourer, take to work himself, participate directly in the process of production, but he is then
-only a hybrid between capitalist and labourer, a “small master.” A certain stage of capitalist
-production necessitates that the capitalist be able to devote the whole of the time during which he
-functions as a capitalist, i.e., as personified capital, to the appropriation and therefore control of
-the labour of others, and to the selling of the products of this labour.4 The guilds of the middle
-ages therefore tried to prevent by force the transformation of the master of a trade into a capitalist,
-by limiting the number of labourers that could be employed by one master within a very small
-maximum. The possessor of money or commodities actually turns into a capitalist in such cases
-only where the minimum sum advanced for production greatly exceeds the maximum of the
-middle ages. Here, as in natural science, is shown the correctness of the law discovered by Hegel
-(in his “Logic”), that merely quantitative differences beyond a certain point pass into qualitative
-changes.5
-The minimum of the sum of value that the individual possessor of money or commodities must
-command, in order to metamorphose himself into a capitalist, changes with the different stages of
-development of capitalist production, and is at given stages different in different spheres of
-production, according to their special and technical conditions. Certain spheres of production
-demand, even at the very outset of capitalist production, a minimum of capital that is not as yet
-found in the hands of single individuals. This gives rise partly to state subsidies to private
-persons, as in France in the time of Clobber, and as in many German states up to our own epoch,
-partly to the formation of societies with legal monopoly for the exploitation of certain branches of
-industry and commerce, the forerunners of our modern joint stock companies.6
-Within the process of production, as we have seen, capital acquired the command over labour,
-i.e., over functioning labour-power or the labourer himself. Personified capital, the capitalist takes
-care that the labourer does his work regularly and with the proper degree of intensity.
-Capital further developed into a coercive relation, which compels the working class to do more
-work than the narrow round of its own life-wants prescribes. As a producer of the activity of
-others, as a pumper-out of surplus labour and exploiter of labour-power, it surpasses in energy,
-disregard of bounds, recklessness and efficiency, all earlier systems of production based on
-directly compulsory labour.
-At first, capital subordinates labour on the basis of the technical conditions in which it historically
-finds it. It does not, therefore, change immediately the mode of production. The production of
-surplus-value – in the form hitherto considered by us – by means of simple extension of the
-working day, proved, therefore, to be independent of any change in the mode of production itself.
-It was not less active in the old-fashioned bakeries than in the modern cotton factories.
-If we consider the process of production from the point of view of the simple labour process, the
-labourer stands in relation to the means of production, not in their quality as capital, but as the
-217 Chapter 11
-mere means and material of his own intelligent productive activity. In tanning, e.g., he deals with
-the skins as his simple object of labour. It is not the capitalist whose skin he tans. But it is
-different as soon as we deal with the process of production from the point of view of the process
-of creation of surplus-value. The means of production are at once changed into means for the
-absorption of the labour of others. It is now no longer the labourer that employs the means of
-production, but the means of production that employ the labourer. Instead of being consumed by
-him as material elements of his productive activity, they consume him as the ferment necessary to
-their own life-process, and the life-process of capital consists only in its movement as value
-constantly expanding, constantly multiplying itself. Furnaces and workshops that stand idle by
-night, and absorb no living labour, are “a mere loss” to the capitalist. Hence, furnaces and
-workshops constitute lawful claims upon the night-labour of the work-people. The simple
-transformation of money into the material factors of the process of production, into means of
-production, transforms the latter into a title and a right to the labour and surplus labour of others.
-An example will show, in conclusion, how this sophistication, peculiar to and characteristic of
-capitalist production, this complete inversion of the relation between dead and living labour,
-between value and the force that creates value, mirrors itself in the consciousness of capitalists.
-During the revolt of the English factory lords between 1848 and 1850, “the head of one of the
-oldest and most respectable houses in the West of Scotland, Messrs. Carlile Sons & Co., of the
-linen and cotton thread factory at Paisley, a company which has now existed for about a century,
-which was in operation in 1752, and four generations of the same family have conducted it” ...
-this “very intelligent gentleman” then wrote a letter7 in the Glasgow Daily Mail of April 25th,
-1849, with the title, “The relay system,” in which among other things the following grotesquely
-naïve passage occurs: “Let us now ... see what evils will attend the limiting to 10 hours the
-working of the factory.... They amount to the most serious damage to the millowner’s prospects
-and property. If he (i.e., his “hands”) worked 12 hours before, and is limited to 10, then every 12
-machines or spindles in his establishment shrink to 10, and should the works be disposed of, they
-will be valued only as 10, so that a sixth part would thus be deducted from the value of every
-factory in the country.”8
-To this West of Scotland bourgeois brain, inheriting the accumulated capitalistic qualities of
-“four generations,” the value of the means of production, spindles, &c., is so inseparably mixed
-up with their property, as capital, to expand their own value, and to swallow up daily a definite
-quantity of the unpaid labour of others, that the head of the firm of Carlile & Co. actually
-imagines that if he sells his factory, not only will the value of the spindles be paid to him, but, in
-addition, their power of annexing surplus-value, not only the labour which is embodied in them,
-and is necessary to the production of spindles of this kind, but also the surplus labour which they
-help to pump out daily from the brave Scots of Paisley, and for that very reason he thinks that
-with the shortening of the working day by 2 hours, the selling-price of 12 spinning machines
-dwindles to that of 10!
-1This elementary law appears to be unknown to the vulgar economists, who, upside-down
-Archimedes, in the determination of the market-price of labour by supply and demand, imagine they
-have found the fulcrum by means of which, not to move the world, but to stop its motion.
-2 Further particulars will be given in Book IV.
-3 “The Labour, that is the economic time, of society, is a given portion, say ten hours a day of a
-million of people, or ten million hours.... Capital has its boundary of increase. This boundary may, at
-218 Chapter 11
-any given period, be attained in the actual extent of economic time employed.” (“An Essay on the
-Political Economy of Nations.” London, 1821, pp. 47, 49.)
-4 “The farmer cannot rely on his own labour, and if he does, I will maintain that he is a loser by it. His
-employment should be a general attention to the whole: his thresher must be watched, or he will soon
-lose his wages in corn not threshed out, his mowers, reapers, &c., must be looked after; he must
-constantly go round his fences; he must see there is no neglect; which would be the case if he was
-confined to any one spot.” (“An Inquiry into the Connexion between the Present Price of Provisions
-and the Size of Farms, &c. By a Farmer.” London, 1773, p. 12.) This book is very interesting. In it the
-genesis of the “capitalist farmer” or “merchant farmer,” as he is explicitly called, may be studied, and
-his self-glorification at the expense of the small farmer who has only to do with bare subsistence, be
-noted. “The class of capitalists are from the first partially, and they become ultimately completely,
-discharged from the necessity of the manual labour.” (“Textbook of Lectures on the Political
-Economy of Nations. By the Rev. Richard Jones.” Hertford 1852. Lecture III., p. 39.)
-5 The molecular theory of modern chemistry first scientifically worked out by Laurent and Gerhardt
-rests on no other law. (Addition to 3rd Edition.) For the explanation of this statement, which is not
-very clear to non-chemists, we remark that the author speaks here of the homologous series of carbon
-compounds, first so named by C. Gerhardt in 1843, each series of which has its own general algebraic
-formula. Thus the series of paraffins: C nH 2n+2, that of the normal alcohols: C nH 2n+2O; of the normal
-fatty acids: CnH 2nO 2 and many others. In the above examples, by the simply quantitative addition of
-CH 2 to the molecular formula, a qualitatively different body is each time formed. On the share
-(overestimated by Marx) of Laurent and Gerhardt in the determination of this important fact see Kopp,
-“Entwicklung der Chemie.” Munchen, 1873, pp. 709, 716, and Schorkmmer, “The Rise and
-Development of Organic Chemistry.” London, 1879, p. 54. — F. E.. See Letter from Marx to Engels,
-22 June 1867
-For Hegel’s formulation of the idea in the Logic, see Remark: Examples of Such Nodal Lines; the
-Maxim, ‘Nature Does Not Make Leaps’.
-6 Martin Luther calls these kinds of institutions: “The Company Monopolia.”
-7 Reports of Insp. of Fact., April 30th, 1849, p. 59.
-8 l.c., p. 60. Factory Inspector Stuart, himself a Scotchman, and in contrast to the English Factory
-Inspectors, quite taken captive by the capitalistic method of thinking, remarks expressly on this letter
-which he incorporates in his report that it is “the most useful of the communications which any of the
-factory-owners working with relays have given to those engaged in the same trade, and which is the
-most calculated to remove the prejudices of such of them as have scruples respecting any change of
-the arrangement of the hours of work.”
-Part 4: Production of Relative
-Surplus-Value
-220 Chapter 12
-Chapter 12: The Concept of Relative Surplus-
-Value
-That portion of the working day which merely produces an equivalent for the value paid by the
-capitalist for his labour-power, has, up to this point, been treated by us as a constant magnitude,
-and such in fact it is, under given conditions of production and at a given stage in the economic
-development of society. Beyond this, his necessary labour-time, the labourer, we saw, could
-continue to work for 2, 3, 4, 6, &c., hours. The rate of surplus-value and the length of the working
-day depended on the magnitude of this prolongation. Though the necessary labour-time was
-constant, we saw, on the other hand, that the total working day was variable. Now suppose we
-have a working day whose length, and whose apportionment between necessary labour and
-surplus labour, are given. Let the whole line a c, a–b–c represent, for example, a working day of
-12 hours; the portion of a b 10 hours of necessary labour, and the portion b c 2 hours of surplus
-labour. How now can the production of surplus-value be increased, i.e., how can the surplus
-labour be prolonged, without, or independently of, any prolongation of a c?
-Although the length of a c is given, b c appears to be capable of prolongation, if not by extension
-beyond its end c, which is also the end of the working day a c, yet, at all events, by pushing back
-its starting-point b in the direction of a. Assume that b'–b in the line ab'bc is equal to half of b c
-a–––b'–b––c
-or to one hour’s labour-time. If now, in a c, the working day of 12 hours, we move the point b to
-b', b c becomes b' c; the surplus labour increases by one half, from 2 hours to 3 hours, although
-the working day remains as before at 12 hours. This extension of the surplus labour-time from b c
-to b' c, from 2 hours to 3 hours, is, however, evidently impossible, without a simultaneous
-contraction of the necessary labour-time from a b into a b', from 10 hours to 9 hours. The
-prolongation of the surplus labour would correspond to a shortening of the necessary labour; or a
-portion of the labour-time previously consumed, in reality, for the labourer’s own benefit, would
-be converted into labour-time for the benefit of the capitalist. There would be an alteration, not in
-the length of the working day, but in its division into necessary labour-time and surplus labour-
-time.
-On the other hand, it is evident that the duration of the surplus labour is given, when the length of
-the working day, and the value of labour-power, are given. The value of labour-power, i.e., the
-labour-time requisite to produce labour-power, determines the labour-time necessary for the
-reproduction of that value. If one working-hour be embodied in sixpence, and the value of a day’s
-labour-power be five shillings, the labourer must work 10 hours a day, in order to replace the
-value paid by capital for his labour-power, or to produce an equivalent for the value of his daily
-necessary means of subsistence. Given the value of these means of subsistence, the value of his
-labour-power is given;1 and given the value of his labour-power, the duration of his necessary
-labour-time is given. The duration of the surplus labour, however, is arrived at, by subtracting the
-necessary labour-time from the total working day. Ten hours subtracted from twelve, leave two,
-and it is not easy to see, how, under the given conditions, the surplus labour can possibly be
-prolonged beyond two hours. No doubt, the capitalist can, instead of five shillings, pay the
-labourer four shillings and sixpence or even less. For the reproduction of this value of four
-shillings and sixpence, nine hours’ labour-time would suffice; and consequently three hours of
-surplus labour, instead of two, would accrue to the capitalist, and the surplus-value would rise
-from one shilling to eighteen-pence. This result, however, would be obtained only by lowering
-221 Chapter 12
-the wages of the labourer below the value of his labour-power. With the four shillings and
-sixpence which he produces in nine hours, he commands one-tenth less of the necessaries of life
-than before, and consequently the proper reproduction of his labour-power is crippled. The
-surplus labour would in this case be prolonged only by an overstepping of its normal limits; its
-domain would be extended only by a usurpation of part of the domain of necessary labour-time.
-Despite the important part which this method plays in actual practice, we are excluded from
-considering it in this place, by our assumption, that all commodities, including labour-power, are
-bought and sold at their full value. Granted this, it follows that the labour-time necessary for the
-production of labour-power, or for the reproduction of its value, cannot be lessened by a fall in
-the labourer’s wages below the value of his labour-power, but only by a fall in this value itself.
-Given the length of the working day, the prolongation of the surplus labour must of necessity
-originate in the curtailment of the necessary labour-time; the latter cannot arise from the former.
-In the example we have taken, it is necessary that the value of labour-power should actually fall
-by one-tenth, in order that the necessary labour-time may be diminished by one-tenth, i.e., from
-ten hours to nine, and in order that the surplus labour may consequently be prolonged from two
-hours to three.
-Such a fall in the value of labour-power implies, however, that the same necessaries of life which
-were formerly produced in ten hours, can now be produced in nine hours. But this is impossible
-without an increase in the productiveness of labour. For example, suppose a shoe-maker, with
-given tools, makes in one working day of twelve hours, one pair of boots. If he must make two
-pairs in the same time, the productiveness of his labour must be doubled; and this cannot be done,
-except by an alteration in his tools or in his mode of working, or in both. Hence, the conditions of
-production, i.e., his mode of production, and the labour-process itself, must be revolutionised. By
-increase in the productiveness of labour, we mean, generally, an alteration in the labour-process,
-of such a kind as to shorten the labour-time socially necessary for the production of a commodity,
-and to endow a given quantity of labour with the power of producing a greater quantity of use-
-value.2 Hitherto in treating of surplus-value, arising from a simple prolongation of the working
-day, we have assumed the mode of production to be given and invariable. But when surplus-value
-has to be produced by the conversion of necessary labour into surplus labour, it by no means
-suffices for capital to take over the labour-process in the form under which it has been historically
-handed down, and then simply to prolong the duration of that process. The technical and social
-conditions of the process, and consequently the very mode of production must be revolutionised,
-before the productiveness of labour can be increased. By that means alone can the value of
-labour-power be made to sink, and the portion of the working day necessary for the reproduction
-of that value, be shortened.
-The surplus-value produced by prolongation of the working day, I call absolute surplus-value. On
-the other hand, the surplus-value arising from the curtailment of the necessary labour-time, and
-from the corresponding alteration in the respective lengths of the two components of the working
-day, I call relative surplus-value.
-In order to effect a fall in the value of labour-power, the increase in the productiveness of labour
-must seize upon those branches of industry whose products determine the value of labour-power,
-and consequently either belong to the class of customary means of subsistence, or are capable of
-supplying the place of those means. But the value of a commodity is determined, not only by the
-quantity of labour which the labourer directly bestows upon that commodity, but also by the
-labour contained in the means of production. For instance, the value of a pair of boots depends
-not only on the cobbler’s labour, but also on the value of the leather, wax, thread, &c. Hence, a
-fall in the value of labour-power is also brought about by an increase in the productiveness of
-222 Chapter 12
-labour, and by a corresponding cheapening of commodities in those industries which supply the
-instruments of labour and the raw material, that form the material elements of the constant capital
-required for producing the necessaries of life. But an increase in the productiveness of labour in
-those branches of industry which supply neither the necessaries of life, nor the means of
-production for such necessaries, leaves the value of labour-power undisturbed.
-The cheapened commodity, of course, causes only a pro tanto fall in the value of labour-power, a
-fall proportional to the extent of that commodity’s employment in the reproduction of labour-
-power. Shirts, for instance, are a necessary means of subsistence, but are only one out of many.
-The totality of the necessaries of life consists, however, of various commodities, each the product
-of a distinct industry; and the value of each of those commodities enters as a component part into
-the value of labour-power. This latter value decreases with the decrease of the labour-time
-necessary for its reproduction; the total decrease being the sum of all the different curtailments of
-labour-time effected in those various and distinct industries. This general result is treated, here, as
-if it were the immediate result directly aimed at in each individual case. Whenever an individual
-capitalist cheapens shirts, for instance, by increasing the productiveness of labour he by no means
-necessarily aims at reducing the value of labour-power and shortening, pro tanto the necessary
-labour-time. But it is only in so far as he ultimately contributes to this result, that he assists in
-raising the general rate of surplus-value.3 The general and necessary tendencies of capital must be
-distinguished from their forms of manifestation.
-It is not our intention to consider, here, the way in which the laws, immanent in capitalist
-production, manifest themselves in the movements of individual masses of capital, where they
-assert themselves as coercive laws of competition, and are brought home to the mind and
-consciousness of the individual capitalist as the directing motives of his operations. But this much
-is clear; a scientific analysis of competition is not possible, before we have a conception of the
-inner nature of capital, just as the apparent motions of the heavenly bodies are not intelligible to
-any but him, who is acquainted with their real motions, motions which are not directly perceptible
-by the senses. Nevertheless, for the better comprehension of the production of relative surplus-
-value, we may add the following remarks, in which we assume nothing more than the results we
-have already obtained.
-If one hour’s labour is embodied in sixpence, a value of six shillings will be produced in a
-working day of 12 hours. Suppose, that with the prevailing productiveness of labour, 12 articles
-are produced in these 12 hours. Let the value of the means of production used up in each article
-be sixpence. Under these circumstances, each article costs one shilling: sixpence for the value of
-the means of production, and sixpence for the value newly added in working with those means.
-Now let some one capitalist contrive to double the productiveness of labour, and to produce in the
-working day of 12 hours, 24 instead of 12 such articles. The value of the means of production
-remaining the same, the value of each article will fall to ninepence, made up of sixpence for the
-value of the means of production and threepence for the value newly added by the labour. Despite
-the doubled productiveness of labour, the day’s labour creates, as before, a new value of six
-shillings and no more, which, however, is now spread over twice as many articles. Of this value
-each article now has embodied in it 1/24th, instead of 1/12th, threepence instead of sixpence; or,
-what amounts to the same thing, only half an hour’s instead of a whole hour’s labour-time, is now
-added to the means of production while they are being transformed into each article. The
-individual value of these articles is now below their social value; in other words, they have cost
-less labour-time than the great bulk of the same article produced under the average social
-conditions. Each article costs, on an average, one shilling, and represents 2 hours of social labour;
-but under the altered mode of production it costs only ninepence, or contains only 1½ hours’
-223 Chapter 12
-labour. The real value of a commodity is, however, not its individual value, but its social value;
-that is to say, the real value is not measured by the labour-time that the article in each individual
-case costs the producer, but by the labour-time socially required for its production. If therefore,
-the capitalist who applies the new method, sells his commodity at its social value of one shilling,
-he sells it for threepence above its individual value, and thus realises an extra surplus-value of
-threepence. On the other hand, the working day of 12 hours is, as regards him, now represented
-by 24 articles instead of 12. Hence, in order to get rid of the product of one working day, the
-demand must be double what it was, i.e., the market must become twice as extensive. Other
-things being equal, his commodities can command a more extended market only by a diminution
-of their prices. He will therefore sell them above their individual but under their social value, say
-at tenpence each. By this means he still squeezes an extra surplus-value of one penny out of each.
-This augmentation of surplus-value is pocketed by him, whether his commodities belong or not to
-the class of necessary means of subsistence that participate in determining the general value of
-labour-power. Hence, independently of this latter circumstance, there is a motive for each
-individual capitalist to cheapen his commodities, by increasing the productiveness of labour.
-Nevertheless, even in this case, the increased production of surplus-value arises from the
-curtailment of the necessary labour-time, and from the corresponding prolongation of the surplus
-labour.4 Let the necessary labour-time amount to 10 hours, the value of a day’s labour-power to
-five shillings, the surplus labour-time to 2 hours, and the daily surplus-value to one shilling. But
-the capitalist now produces 24 articles, which he sells at tenpence a-piece, making twenty
-shillings in all. Since the value of the means of production is twelve shillings, 14 2/5 of these
-articles merely replace the constant capital advanced. The labour of the 12 hours’ working day is
-represented by the remaining 9 3/5 articles. Since the price of the labour-power is five shillings, 6
-articles represent the necessary labour-time, and 3 3/5 articles the surplus labour. The ratio of the
-necessary labour to the surplus labour, which under average social conditions was 5:1, is now
-only 5:3. The same result may be arrived at in the following way. The value of the product of the
-working day of 12 hours is twenty shillings. Of this sum, twelve shillings belong to the value of
-the means of production, a value that merely re-appears. There remain eight shillings, which are
-the expression in money, of the value newly created during the working day. This sum is greater
-than the sum in which average social labour of the same kind is expressed: twelve hours of the
-latter labour are expressed by six shillings only. The exceptionally productive labour operates as
-intensified labour; it creates in equal periods of time greater values than average social labour of
-the same kind. (See Ch. I. Sect 2. p. 44.) But our capitalist still continues to pay as before only
-five shillings as the value of a day’s labour-power. Hence, instead of 10 hours, the labourer need
-now work only 7½ hours, in order to reproduce this value. His surplus labour is, therefore,
-increased by 2½ hours, and the surplus-value he produces grows from one, into three shillings.
-Hence, the capitalist who applies the improved method of production, appropriates to surplus
-labour a greater portion of the working day, than the other capitalists in the same trade. He does
-individually, what the whole body of capitalists engaged in producing relative surplus-value, do
-collectively. On the other hand, however, this extra surplus-value vanishes, so soon as the new
-method of production has become general, and has consequently caused the difference between
-the individual value of the cheapened commodity and its social value to vanish. The law of the
-determination of value by labour-time, a law which brings under its sway the individual capitalist
-who applies the new method of production, by compelling him to sell his goods under their social
-value, this same law, acting as a coercive law of competition, forces his competitors to adopt the
-new method.5 The general rate of surplus-value is, therefore, ultimately affected by the whole
-process, only when the increase in the productiveness of labour, has seized upon those branches
-224 Chapter 12
-of production that are connected with, and has cheapened those commodities that form part of,
-the necessary means of subsistence, and are therefore elements of the value of labour-power.
-The value of commodities is in inverse ratio to the productiveness of labour. And so, too, is the
-value of labour-power, because it depends on the values of commodities. Relative surplus-value
-is, on the contrary, directly proportional to that productiveness. It rises with rising and falls with
-falling productiveness. The value of money being assumed to be constant, an average social
-working day of 12 hours always produces the same new value, six shillings, no matter how this
-sum may be apportioned between surplus-value and wages. But if, in consequence of increased
-productiveness, the value of the necessaries of life fall, and the value of a day’s labour-power be
-thereby reduced from five shillings to three, the surplus-value increases from one shilling to three.
-Ten hours were necessary for the reproduction of the value of the labour-power; now only six are
-required. Four hours have been set free, and can be annexed to the domain of surplus labour.
-Hence there is immanent in capital an inclination and constant tendency, to heighten the
-productiveness of labour, in order to cheapen commodities, and by such cheapening to cheapen
-the labourer himself.6
-The value of a commodity is, in itself, of no interest to the capitalist. What alone interests him, is
-the surplus-value that dwells in it, and is realisable by sale. Realisation of the surplus-value
-necessarily carries with it the refunding of the value that was advanced. Now, since relative
-surplus-value increases in direct proportion to the development of the productiveness of labour,
-while, on the other hand, the value of commodities diminishes in the same proportion; since one
-and the same process cheapens commodities, and augments the surplus-value contained in them;
-we have here the solution of the riddle: why does the capitalist, whose sole concern is the
-production of exchange-value, continually strive to depress the exchange-value of commodities?
-A riddle with which Quesnay, one of the founders of Political Economy, tormented his
-opponents, and to which they could give him no answer.
-“You acknowledge,” he says, “that the more expenses and the cost of labour can, in the
-manufacture of industrial products, be reduced without injury to production, the more
-advantageous is such reduction, because it diminishes the price of the finished article. And yet,
-you believe that the production of wealth, which arises from the labour of the workpeople,
-consists in the augmentation of the exchange-value of their products.”7
-The shortening of the working day is, therefore, by no means what is aimed at, in capitalist
-production, when labour is economised by increasing its productiveness.8 It is only the shortening
-of the labour-time, necessary for the production of a definite quantity of commodities, that is
-aimed at. The fact that the workman, when the productiveness of his labour has been increased,
-produces, say 10 times as many commodities as before, and thus spends one-tenth as much
-labour-time on each, by no means prevents him from continuing to work 12 hours as before, nor
-from producing in those 12 hours 1,200 articles instead of 120. Nay, more, his working day may
-be prolonged at the same time, so as to make him produce, say 1,400 articles in 14 hours. In the
-treatises, therefore, of economists of the stamp of MacCulloch, Ure, Senior, and tutti quanti [the
-like], we may read upon one page, that the labourer owes a debt of gratitude to capital for
-developing his productiveness, because the necessary labour-time is thereby shortened, and on the
-next page, that he must prove his gratitude by working in future for 15 hours instead of 10. The
-object of all development of the productiveness of labour, within the limits of capitalist
-production, is to shorten that part of the working day, during which the workman must labour for
-his own benefit, and by that very shortening, to lengthen the other part of the day, during which
-he is at liberty to work gratis for the capitalist. How far this result is also attainable, without
-225 Chapter 12
-cheapening commodities, will appear from an examination of the particular modes of producing
-relative surplus-value, to which examination we now proceed.
-1 The value of his average daily wages is determined by what the labourer requires “so as to live,
-labour, and generate.” (Wm. Petty: “Political Anatomy of Ireland,” 1672, p. 64.) “The price of Labour
-is always constituted of the price of necessaries ... whenever ... the labouring man’s wages will not,
-suitably to his low rank and station, as a labouring man, support such a family as is often the lot of
-many of them to have,” he does not receive proper wages. (J. Vanderlint, l.c., p. 15.) “Le simple
-ouvrier, qui n’a que ses bras et son industrie, n’a rien qu’autant qu’il parvient à vendre à d’autres sa
-peine... En tout genre de travail il doit arriver, et il arrive en effet, que le salaire de l’ouvrier se borne à
-ce qui lui est nécessaire pour lui procurer sa subsistance.” [The mere workman, who has only his arms
-and his industry, has nothing unless he succeeds in selling his labour to others ... In every kind of work
-it cannot fail to happen, as a matter of fact it does happen, that the wages of the workman are limited
-to what is necessary to procure him his subsistence.] (Turgot, “Réflexions, &c.,” Oeuvres, éd. Daire t.
-I, p. 10.) “The price of the necessaries of life is, in fact, the cost of producing labour.” (Malthus,
-“Inquiry into, &c., Rent,” London, 1815, p. 48, note.)
-2 Quando si perfezionano le arti, che non è altro che la scoperta di nuove vie, onde si possa compiere
-una manufattura con meno gente o (che è lo stesso) in minor tempo di prima.” (Galiani, l.c., p. 159.)
-“L’économie sur les frais de production ne peut donc être autre chose que l’économie sur la quantité
-de travail employé pour produire.” [Perfection of the crafts means nothing other than the discovery of
-new ways of making a product with fewer people, or (which is the same thing) in less time than
-previously] (Sismondi, “Études,” t. I. p. 22.)
-3 “Let us suppose ... the products ... of the manufacturer are doubled by improvement in machinery ...
-he will be able to clothe his workmen by means of a smaller proportion of the entire return ... and thus
-his profit will be raised. But in no other way will it be influenced.” (Ramsay, l.c., pp. 168, 169.)
-4 “A man’s profit does not depend upon his command of the produce of other men’s labour, but upon
-his command of labour itself. If he can sell his goods at a higher price, while his workmen’s wages
-remain unaltered, he is clearly benefited.... A smaller proportion of what he produces is sufficient to
-put that labour into motion, and a larger proportion consequently remains for himself.” (“Outlines of
-Pol. Econ.” London, 1832, pp. 49, 50.)
-5 “If my neighbour by doing much with little labour, can sell cheap, I must contrive to sell as cheap as
-he. So that every art, trade, or engine, doing work with labour of fewer hands, and consequently
-cheaper, begets in others a kind of necessity and emulation, either of using the same art, trade, or
-engine, or of inventing something like it, that every man may be upon the square, that no man may be
-able to undersell his neighbour.” (“The Advantages of the East India Trade to England,” London,
-1720, p. 67.)
-6 “In whatever proportion the expenses of a labourer are diminished, in the same proportion will his
-wages be diminished, if the restraints upon industry are at the same time taken off.” (“Considerations
-Concerning Taking off the Bounty on Corn Exported,” &c., London, 1753, p. 7.) “The interest of trade
-requires, that corn and all provisions should be as cheap as possible; for whatever makes them dear,
-must make labour dear also ... in all countries, where industry is not restrained, the price of provisions
-must affect the price of labour. This will always be diminished when the necessaries of life grow
-cheaper.” (I. c., p. 3.) “Wages are decreased in the same proportion as the powers of production
-increase. Machinery, it is true, cheapens the necessaries of life, but it also cheapens the labourer.” (“A
-Prize Essay on the Comparative Merits of Competition and Co-operation.” London, 1834, p. 27.)
-7 “Ils conviennent que plus on peut, sans préjudice, épargner de frais ou de travaux dispendieux dans
-la fabrication des ouvrages des artisans, plus cette épargne est profitable par la diminution des prix de
-226 Chapter 12
-ces ouvrages. Cependant ils croient que la production de richesse qui résulte des travaux des artisans
-consiste dans l’augmentation de la valeur vénale de leurs ouvrages.” (Quesnay: “Dialogues sur le
-Commerce et les Travaux des Artisans.” pp. 188, 189.)
-8 “Ces spéculateurs si économes du travail des ouvriers qu’il faudrait qu’ils payassent.” [These
-speculators, who are so economical of the labour of workers they would have to pay] (J. N. Bidaut:
-“Du Monopole qui s’établit dans les arts industriels et le commerce.” Paris, 1828, p. 13.) “The
-employer will be always on the stretch to economise time and labour.” (Dugald Stewart: Works ed. by
-Sir W. Hamilton, Edinburgh, v., viii., 1855. “Lectures on Polit. Econ.,” p. 318.) “Their (the
-capitalists’) interest is that the productive powers of the labourers they employ should be the greatest
-possible. On promoting that power their attention is fixed and almost exclusively fixed.” (R. Jones:
-l.c., Lecture III.)
-Chapter 13: Co-operation
-Capitalist production only then really begins, as we have already seen, when each individual
-capital employs simultaneously a comparatively large number of labourers; when consequently
-the labour-process is carried on on an extensive scale and yields, relatively, large quantities of
-products. A greater number of labourers working together, at the same time, in one place (or, if
-you will, in the same field of labour), in order to produce the same sort of commodity under the
-mastership of one capitalist, constitutes, both historically and logically, the starting-point of
-capitalist production. With regard to the mode of production itself, manufacture, in its strict
-meaning, is hardly to be distinguished, in its earliest stages, from the handicraft trades of the
-guilds, otherwise than by the greater number of workmen simultaneously employed by one and
-the same individual capital. The workshop of the medieval master handicraftsman is simply
-enlarged.
-At first, therefore, the difference is purely quantitative. We have shown that the surplus-value
-produced by a given capital is equal to the surplus-value produced by each workman multiplied
-by the number of workmen simultaneously employed. The number of workmen in itself does nor
-affect, either the rate of surplus-value, or the degree of exploitation of labour-power. If a working
-day of 12 hours be embodied in six shillings, 1,200 such days will be embodied in 1,200 times 6
-shillings. In one case 12 × 1,200 working-hours, and in the other 12 such hours are incorporated
-in the product. In the production of value a number of workmen rank merely as so many
-individual workmen; and it therefore makes no difference in the value produced whether the
-1,200 men work separately, or united under the control of one capitalist.
-Nevertheless, within certain limits, a modification takes place. The labour realised in value, is
-labour of an average social quality; is consequently the expenditure of average labour-power. Any
-average magnitude, however, is merely the average of a number of separate magnitudes all of one
-kind, but differing as to quantity. In every industry, each individual labourer, be he Peter or Paul,
-differs from the average labourer. These individual differences, or “errors” as they are called in
-mathematics, compensate one another, and vanish, whenever a certain minimum number of
-workmen are employed together. The celebrated sophist and sycophant, Edmund Burke, goes so
-far as to make the following assertion, based on his practical observations as a farmer; viz., that
-“in so small a platoon” as that of five farm labourers, all individual differences in the labour
-vanish, and that consequently any given five adult farm labourers taken together, will in the same
-time do as much work as any other five.1 But, however that may be, it is clear, that the collective
-working day of a large number of workmen simultaneously employed, divided by the number of
-these workmen, gives one day of average social labour. For example, let the working day of each
-individual be 12 hours. Then the collective working day of 12 men simultaneously employed,
-consists of 144 hours; and although the labour of each of the dozen men may deviate more or less
-from average social labour, each of them requiring a different time for the same operation, yet
-since the working day of each is one-twelfth of the collective working day of 144 hours, it
-possesses the qualities of an average social working day. From the point of view, however, of the
-capitalist who employs these 12 men, the working day is that of the whole dozen. Each individual
-man’s day is an aliquot part of the collective working day, no matter whether the 12 men assist
-one another in their work, or whether the connexion between their operations consists merely in
-the fact, that the men are all working for the same capitalist. But if the 12 men are employed in
-six pairs, by as many different small masters, it will be quite a matter of chance, whether each of
-these masters produces the same value, and consequently whether he realises the general rate of
-228 Chapter 13
-surplus-value. Deviations would occur in individual cases. If one workman required considerably
-more time for the production of a commodity than is socially necessary, the duration of the
-necessary labour-time would, in his case, sensibly deviate from the labour-time socially necessary
-on an average; and consequently his labour would not count as average labour, nor his labour-
-power as average labour-power. It would either be not saleable at all, or only at something below
-the average value of labour-power. A fixed minimum of efficiency in all labour is therefore
-assumed, and we shall see, later on, that capitalist production provides the means of fixing this
-minimum. Nevertheless, this minimum deviates from the average, although on the other hand the
-capitalist has to pay the average value of labour-power. Of the six small masters, one would
-therefore squeeze out more than the average rate of surplus-value, another less. The inequalities
-would be compensated for the society at large, but not for the individual masters. Thus the laws
-of the production of value are only fully realised for the individual producer, when he produces as
-a capitalist, and employs a number of workmen together, whose labour, by its collective nature, is
-at once stamped as average social labour.2
-Even without an alteration in the system of working, the simultaneous employment of a large
-number of labourers effects a revolution in the material conditions of the labour-process. The
-buildings in which they work, the store-houses for the raw material, the implements and utensils
-used simultaneously or in turns by the workmen; in short, a portion of the means of production,
-are now consumed in common. On the one hand, the exchange-value of these means of
-production is not increased; for the exchange-value of a commodity is not raised by its use-value
-being consumed more thoroughly and to greater advantage. On the other hand, they are used in
-common, and therefore on a larger scale than before. A room where twenty weavers work at
-twenty looms must be larger than the room of a single weaver with two assistants. But it costs
-less labour to build one workshop for twenty persons than to build ten to accommodate two
-weavers each; thus the value of the means of production that are concentrated for use in common
-on a large scale does not increase in direct proportion to the expansion and to the increased useful
-effect of those means. When consumed in common, they give up a smaller part of their value to
-each single product; partly because the total value they part with is spread over a greater quantity
-of products, and partly because their value, though absolutely greater, is, having regard to their
-sphere of action in the process, relatively less than the value of isolated means of production.
-Owing to this, the value of a part of the constant capital falls, and in proportion to the magnitude
-of the fall, the total value of the commodity also falls. The effect is the same as if the means of
-production had cost less. The economy in their application is entirely owing to their being
-consumed in common by a large number of workmen. Moreover, this character of being
-necessary conditions of social labour, a character that distinguishes them from the dispersed and
-relatively more costly means of production of isolated, independent labourers, or small masters, is
-acquired even when the numerous workmen assembled together do not assist one another, but
-merely work side by side. A portion of the instruments of labour acquires this social character
-before the labour-process itself does so.
-Economy in the use of the means of production has to be considered under two aspects. First, as
-cheapening commodities, and thereby bringing about a fall in the value of labour-power.
-Secondly, as altering the ratio of the surplus-value to the total capital advanced, i.e., to the sum of
-the values of the constant and variable capital. The latter aspect will not be considered until we
-come to the third book, to which, with the object of treating them in their proper connexion, we
-also relegate many other points that relate to the present question. The march of our analysis
-compels this splitting up of the subject-matter, a splitting up that is quite in keeping with the spirit
-of capitalist production. For since, in this mode of production, the workman finds the instruments
-229 Chapter 13
-of labour existing independently of him as another man’s property, economy in their use appears,
-with regard to him, to be a distinct operation, one that does not concern him, and which,
-therefore, has no connexion with the methods by which his own personal productiveness is
-increased.
-When numerous labourers work together side by side, whether in one and the same process, or in
-different but connected processes, they are said to co-operate, or to work in co-operation.3
-Just as the offensive power of a squadron of cavalry, or the defensive power of a regiment of
-infantry is essentially different from the sum of the offensive or defensive powers of the
-individual cavalry or infantry soldiers taken separately, so the sum total of the mechanical forces
-exerted by isolated workmen differs from the social force that is developed, when many hands
-take part simultaneously in one and the same undivided operation, such as raising a heavy weight,
-turning a winch, or removing an obstacle.4 In such cases the effect of the combined labour could
-either not be produced at all by isolated individual labour, or it could only be produced by a great
-expenditure of time, or on a very dwarfed scale. Not only have we here an increase in the
-productive power of the individual, by means of co-operation, but the creation of a new power,
-namely, the collective power of masses.5
-Apart from the new power that arises from the fusion of many forces into one single force, mere
-social contact begets in most industries an emulation and a stimulation of the animal spirits that
-heighten the efficiency of each individual workman. Hence it is that a dozen persons working
-together will, in their collective working day of 144 hours, produce far more than twelve isolated
-men each working 12 hours, or than one man who works twelve days in succession.6 The reason
-of this is that man is, if not as Aristotle contends, a political,7 at all events a social animal.
-Although a number of men may be occupied together at the same time on the same, or the same
-kind of work, yet the labour of each, as a part of the collective labour, may correspond to a
-distinct phase of the labour-process, through all whose phases, in consequence of co-operation,
-the subject of their labour passes with greater speed. For instance, if a dozen masons place
-themselves in a row, so as to pass stones from the foot of a ladder to its summit, each of them
-does the same thing; nevertheless, their separate acts form connected parts of one total operation;
-they are particular phases, which must be gone through by each stone; and the stones are thus
-carried up quicker by the 24 hands of the row of men than they could be if each man went
-separately up and down the ladder with his burden.8 The object is carried over the same distance
-in a shorter time. Again, a combination of labour occurs whenever a building, for instance, is
-taken in hand on different sides simultaneously; although here also the co-operating masons are
-doing the same, or the same kind of work. The 12 masons, in their collective working day of 144
-hours, make much more progress with the building than one mason could make working for 12
-days, or 144 hours. The reason is, that a body of men working in concert has hands and eyes both
-before and behind, and is, to a certain degree, omnipresent. The various parts of the work
-progress simultaneously.
-In the above instances we have laid stress upon the point that the men do the same, or the same
-kind of work, because this, the most simple form of labour in common, plays a great part in co-
-operation, even in its most fully developed stage. If the work be complicated, then the mere
-number of the men who co-operate allows of the various operations being apportioned to different
-hands, and, consequently, of being carried on simultaneously. The time necessary for the
-completion of the whole work is thereby shortened.9
-In many industries, there are critical periods, determined by the nature of the process, during
-which certain definite results must be obtained. For instance, if a flock of sheep has to be shorn,
-or a field of wheat to be cut and harvested, the quantity and quality of the product depends on the
-230 Chapter 13
-work being begun and ended within a certain time. In these cases, the time that ought to be taken
-by the process is prescribed, just as it is in herring fishing. A single person cannot carve a
-working day of more than, say 12 hours, out of the natural day, but 100 men co-operating extend
-the working day to 1,200 hours. The shortness of the time allowed for the work is compensated
-for by the large mass of labour thrown upon the field of production at the decisive moment. The
-completion of the task within the proper time depends on the simultaneous application of
-numerous combined working days; the amount of useful effect depends on the number of
-labourers; this number, however, is always smaller than the number of isolated labourers required
-to do the same amount of work in the same period.10 It is owing to the absence of this kind of co-
-operation that, in the western part of the United States, quantities of corn, and in those parts of
-East India where English rule has destroyed the old communities, quantities of cotton, are yearly
-wasted.11
-On the one hand, co-operation allows of the work being carried on over an extended space; it is
-consequently imperatively called for in certain undertakings, such as draining, constructing
-dykes, irrigation works, and the making of canals, roads and railways. On the other hand, while
-extending the scale of production, it renders possible a relative contraction of the arena. This
-contraction of arena simultaneous with, and arising from, extension of scale, whereby a number
-of useless expenses are cut down, is owing to the conglomeration of labourers, to the aggregation
-of various processes, and to the concentration of the means of production.12
-The combined working day produces, relatively to an equal sum of isolated working days, a
-greater quantity of use-values, and, consequently, diminishes the labour-time necessary for the
-production of a given useful effect. Whether the combined working day, in a given case, acquires
-this increased productive power, because it heightens the mechanical force of labour, or extends
-its sphere of action over a greater space, or contracts the field of production relatively to the scale
-of production, or at the critical moment sets large masses of labour to work, or excites emulation
-between individuals and raises their animal spirits, or impresses on the similar operations carried
-on by a number of men the stamp of continuity and many-sidedness, or performs simultaneously
-different operations, or economises the means of production by use in common, or lends to
-individual labour the character of average social labour whichever of these be the cause of the
-increase, the special productive power of the combined working day is, under all circumstances,
-the social productive power of labour, or the productive power of social labour. This power is due
-to co-operation itself. When the labourer co-operates systematically with others, he strips off the
-fetters of his individuality, and develops the capabilities of his species.13
-As a general rule, labourers cannot co-operate without being brought together: their assemblage
-in one place is a necessary condition of their co-operation. Hence wage-labourers cannot co-
-operate, unless they are employed simultaneously by the same capital, the same capitalist, and
-unless therefore their labour-powers are bought simultaneously by him. The total value of these
-labour-powers, or the amount of the wages of these labourers for a day, or a week, as the case
-may be, must be ready in the pocket of the capitalist, before the workmen are assembled for the
-process of production. The payment of 300 workmen at once, though only for one day, requires a
-greater outlay of capital, than does the payment of a smaller number of men, week by week,
-during a whole year. Hence the number of the labourers that co-operate, or the scale of co-
-operation, depends, in the first instance, on the amount of capital that the individual capitalist can
-spare for the purchase of labour-power; in other words, on the extent to which a single capitalist
-has command over the means of subsistence of a number of labourers.
-And as with the variable, so it is with the constant capital. For example, the outlay on raw
-material is 30 times as great, for the capitalist who employs 300 men, as it is for each of the 30
-231 Chapter 13
-capitalists who employ 10 men. The value and quantity of the instruments of labour used in
-common do not, it is true, increase at the same rate as the number of workmen, but they do
-increase very considerably. Hence, concentration of large masses of the means of production in
-the hands of individual capitalists, is a material condition for the co-operation of wage-labourers,
-and the extent of the co-operation or the scale of production, depends on the extent of this
-concentration.
-We saw in a former chapter, that a certain minimum amount of capital was necessary, in order
-that the number of labourers simultaneously employed, and, consequently, the amount of surplus-
-value produced, might suffice to liberate the employer himself from manual labour, to convert
-him from a small master into a capitalist, and thus formally to establish capitalist production. We
-now see that a certain minimum amount is a necessary condition for the conversion of numerous
-isolated and independent processes into one combined social process.
-We also saw that at first, the subjection of labour to capital was only a formal result of the fact,
-that the labourer, instead of working for himself, works for and consequently under the capitalist.
-By the co-operation of numerous wage-labourers, the sway of capital develops into a requisite for
-carrying on the labour-process itself, into a real requisite of production. That a capitalist should
-command on the field of production, is now as indispensable as that a general should command
-on the field of battle.
-All combined labour on a large scale requires, more or less, a directing authority, in order to
-secure the harmonious working of the individual activities, and to perform the general functions
-that have their origin in the action of the combined organism, as distinguished from the action of
-its separate organs. A single violin player is his own conductor; an orchestra requires a separate
-one. The work of directing, superintending, and adjusting, becomes one of the functions of
-capital, from the moment that the labour under the control of capital, becomes co-operative. Once
-a function of capital, it acquires special characteristics.
-The directing motive, the end and aim of capitalist production, is to extract the greatest possible
-amount of surplus-value,14 and consequently to exploit labour-power to the greatest possible
-extent. As the number of the co-operating labourers increases, so too does their resistance to the
-domination of capital, and with it, the necessity for capital to overcome this resistance by
-counterpressure. The control exercised by the capitalist is not only a special function, due to the
-nature of the social labour-process, and peculiar to that process, but it is, at the same time, a
-function of the exploitation of a social labour-process, and is consequently rooted in the
-unavoidable antagonism between the exploiter and the living and labouring raw material he
-exploits.
-Again, in proportion to the increasing mass of the means of production, now no longer the
-property of the labourer, but of the capitalist, the necessity increases for some effective control
-over the proper application of those means.15 Moreover, the co-operation of wage labourers is
-entirely brought about by the capital that employs them. Their union into one single productive
-body and the establishment of a connexion between their individual functions, are matters foreign
-and external to them, are not their own act, but the act of the capital that brings and keeps them
-together. Hence the connexion existing between their various labours appears to them, ideally, in
-the shape of a preconceived plan of the capitalist, and practically in the shape of the authority of
-the same capitalist, in the shape of the powerful will of another, who subjects their activity to his
-aims. If, then, the control of the capitalist is in substance two-fold by reason of the two-fold
-nature of the process of production itself, which, on the one hand, is a social process for
-producing use-values, on the other, a process for creating surplus-value in form that control is
-despotic. As co-operation extends its scale, this despotism takes forms peculiar to itself. Just as at
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-first the capitalist is relieved from actual labour so soon as his capital has reached that minimum
-amount with which capitalist production, as such, begins, so now, he hands over the work of
-direct and constant supervision of the individual workmen, and groups of workmen, to a special
-kind of wage-labourer. An industrial army of workmen, under the command of a capitalist,
-requires, like a real army, officers (managers), and sergeants (foremen, overlookers), who, while
-the work is being done, command in the name of the capitalist. The work of supervision becomes
-their established and exclusive function. When comparing the mode of production of isolated
-peasants and artisans with production by slave-labour, the political economist counts this labour
-of superintendence among the faux frais of production.16 But, when considering the capitalist
-mode of production, he, on the contrary, treats the work of control made necessary by the co-
-operative character of the labour-process as identical with the different work of control,
-necessitated by the capitalist character of that process and the antagonism of interests between
-capitalist and labourer.17 It is not because he is a leader of industry that a man is a capitalist; on
-the contrary, he is a leader of industry because he is a capitalist. The leadership of industry is an
-attribute of capital, just as in feudal times the functions of general and judge, were attributes of
-landed property.18
-The labourer is the owner of his labour-power until he has done bargaining for its sale with the
-capitalist; and he can sell no more than what he has i.e., his individual, isolated labour-power.
-This state of things is in no way altered by the fact that the capitalist, instead of buying the
-labour-power of one man, buys that of 100, and enters into separate contracts with 100
-unconnected men instead of with one. He is at liberty to set the 100 men to work, without letting
-them co-operate. He pays them the value of 100 independent labour-powers, but he does not pay
-for the combined labour-power of the hundred. Being independent of each other, the labourers are
-isolated persons, who enter into relations with the capitalist, but not with one another. This co-
-operation begins only with the labour-process, but they have then ceased to belong to themselves.
-On entering that process, they become incorporated with capital. As co-operators, as members of
-a working organism, they are but special modes of existence of capital. Hence, the productive
-power developed by the labourer when working in co-operation, is the productive power of
-capital. This power is developed gratuitously, whenever the workmen are placed under given
-conditions, and it is capital that places them under such conditions. Because this power costs
-capital nothing, and because, on the other hand, the labourer himself does not develop it before
-his labour belongs to capital, it appears as a power with which capital is endowed by Nature ‒ a
-productive power that is immanent in capital.
-The colossal effects of simple co-operation are to be seen in the gigantic structures of the ancient
-Asiatics, Egyptians, Etruscans, &c.
-“It has happened in times past that these Oriental States, after supplying the
-expenses of their civil and military establishments, have found themselves in
-possession of a surplus which they could apply to works of magnificence or utility
-and in the construction of these their command over the hands and arms of almost
-the entire non-agricultural population has produced stupendous monuments which
-still indicate their power. The teeming valley of the Nile ... produced food for a
-swarming non-agricultural population, and this food, belonging to the monarch
-and the priesthood, afforded the means of erecting the mighty monuments which
-filled the land.... In moving the colossal statues and vast masses of which the
-transport creates wonder, human labour almost alone, was prodigally used.... The
-number of the labourers and the concentration of their efforts sufficed. We see
-mighty coral reefs rising from the depths of the ocean into islands and firm land,
-233 Chapter 13
-yet each individual depositor is puny, weak, and contemptible. The non-
-agricultural labourers of an Asiatic monarchy have little but their individual
-bodily exertions to bring to the task, but their number is their strength, and the
-power of directing these masses gave rise to the palaces and temples, the
-pyramids, and the armies of gigantic statues of which the remains astonish and
-perplex us. It is that confinement of the revenues which feed them, to one or a few
-hands, which makes such undertakings possible.”19
-This power of Asiatic and Egyptian kings, Etruscan theocrats, &c., has in modern society been
-transferred to the capitalist, whether he be an isolated, or as in joint-stock companies, a collective
-capitalist.
-Co-operation, such as we find it at the dawn of human development, among races who live by the
-chase,20 or, say, in the agriculture of Indian communities, is based, on the one hand, on ownership
-in common of the means of production, and on the other hand, on the fact, that in those cases,
-each individual has no more torn himself off from the navel-string of his tribe or community, than
-each bee has freed itself from connexion with the hive. Such co-operation is distinguished from
-capitalistic co-operation by both of the above characteristics. The sporadic application of co-
-operation on a large scale in ancient times, in the middle ages, and in modern colonies, reposes on
-relations of dominion and servitude, principally on slavery. The capitalistic form, on the contrary,
-pre-supposes from first to last, the free wage-labourer, who sells his labour-power to capital.
-Historically, however, this form is developed in opposition to peasant agriculture and to the
-carrying on of independent handicrafts whether in guilds or not.21 From the standpoint of these,
-capitalistic co-operation does not manifest itself as a particular historical form of co-operation,
-but co-operation itself appears to be a historical form peculiar to, and specifically distinguishing,
-the capitalist process of production.
-Just as the social productive power of labour that is developed by co-operation, appears to be the
-productive power of capital, so co-operation itself, contrasted with the process of production
-carried on by isolated independent labourers, or even by small employers, appears to be a specific
-form of the capitalist process of production. It is the first change experienced by the actual
-labour-process, when subjected to capital. This change takes place spontaneously. The
-simultaneous employment of a large number of wage-labourers, in one and the same process,
-which is a necessary condition of this change, also forms the starting-point of capitalist
-production. This point coincides with the birth of capital itself. If then, on the one hand, the
-capitalist mode of production presents itself to us historically, as a necessary condition to the
-transformation of the labour-process into a social process, so, on the other hand, this social form
-of the labour-process presents itself, as a method employed by capital for the more profitable
-exploitation of labour, by increasing that labour’s productiveness.
-In the elementary form, under which we have hitherto viewed it, co-operation is a necessary
-concomitant of all production on a large scale, but it does not, in itself, represent a fixed form
-characteristic of a particular epoch in the development of the capitalist mode of production. At the
-most it appears to do so, and that only approximately, in the handicraft-like beginnings of
-manufacture,22 and in that kind of agriculture on a large scale, which corresponds to the epoch of
-manufacture, and is distinguished from peasant agriculture, mainly by the number of the
-labourers simultaneously employed, and by the mass of the means of production concentrated for
-their use. Simple co-operation is always the prevailing form, in those branches of production in
-which capital operates on a large scale, and division of labour and machinery play but a
-subordinate part.
-234 Chapter 13
-Co-operation ever constitutes the fundamental form of the capitalist mode of production,
-nevertheless the elementary form of co-operation continues to subsist as a particular form of
-capitalist production side by side with the more developed forms of that mode of production.
-1 “Unquestionably, there is a good deal of difference between the value of one man’s labour and that
-of another from strength, dexterity, and honest application. But I am quite sure, from my best
-observation, that any given five men will, in their total, afford a proportion of labour equal to any
-other five within the periods of life I have stated; that is, that among such five men there will be one
-possessing all the qualifications of a good workman, one bad, and the other three middling, and
-approximating to the first, and the last. So that in so small a platoon as that of even five, you will find
-the full complement of all that five men can earn.” (E. Burke, 1. c., pp. 15, 16.) Compare Quételet on
-the average individual.
-2 Professor Roscher claims to have discovered that one needlewoman employed by Mrs. Roscher
-during two days, does more work than two needlewomen employed together during one day. The
-learned professor should not study the capitalist process of production in the nursery, nor under
-circumstances where the principal personage, the capitalist, is wanting.
-3 “Concours de forces.” (Destutt de Tracy, l.c., p. 80.)
-4 “There are numerous operations of so simple a kind as not to admit a division into parts, which
-cannot be performed without the co-operation of many pairs of hands. I would instance the lifting of a
-large tree on to a wain ... everything, in short, which cannot be done unless a great many pairs of
-hands help each other in the same undivided employment and at the same time.” (E. G. Wakefield: “A
-View of the Art of Colonisation.” London, 1849, p. 168.)
-5 “As one man cannot, and ten men must strain to lift a ton of weight, yet 100 men can do it only by
-the strength of a finger of each of them.” (John Betters: “Proposals for Raising a Colledge of
-Industry.” London, 1696, p. 21.)
-6 “There is also” (when the same number of men are employed by one farmer on 300 acres, instead of
-by ten farmers with 30 acres a piece) “an advantage in the proportion of servants, which will not so
-easily be understood but by practical men; for it is natural to say, as 1 is to 4, so are 3 to 12; but this
-will not hold good in practice; for in harvest time and many other operations which require that kind
-of despatch by the throwing many hands together, the work is better and more expeditiously done: f i.
-in harvest, 2 drivers, 2 loaders, 2 pitchers, 2 rakers, and the rest at the rick, or in the barn, will
-despatch double the work that the same number of hands would do if divided into different gangs on
-different farms.” (“An Inquiry into the Connexion between the Present Price of Provisions and the
-Size of Farms.” By a Farmer. London, 1773, pp. 7, 8.)
-7 Strictly, Aristotle’s definition is that man is by nature a town-citizen. This is quite as characteristic of
-ancient classical society as Franklin’s definition of man, as a tool-making animal, is characteristic of
-Yankeedom.
-8 “On doit encore remarquer que cette division partielle de travail peut se faire quand même les
-ouvriers sont occupés d’une même besogne. Des maçons par exemple, occupés à faire passer de mains
-en mains des briques à un échafaudage supérieur, font tous la même besogne, et pourtant il existe
-parmi eux une espèce de division de travail, qui consiste en ce que chacun d’eux fait passer la brique
-par un espace donné, et que tous ensemble la font parvenir beaucoup plus promptement à l’endroit
-marqué qu’ils ne le feraient si chacun d’eux portait sa brique séparément jusqu’à l’échafaudage
-supérieur.” [It should be noted further that this partial division of labour can occur even when the
-workers are engaged in the same task. Masons, for example, engaged in passing bricks from hand to
-235 Chapter 13
-hand to a higher stage of the building, are all performing the same task, and yet there does exist
-amongst them a sort of division of labour. This consists in the fact that each of them passes the brick
-through a given space, and, taken together, they make it arrive much more quickly at the required spot
-than they would do if each of them carried his brick separately to the upper storey] (F. Skarbek:
-“Théorie des richesses sociales.” Paris, 1839, t. I, pp. 97, 98.)
-9 “Est-il question d’exécuter un travail compliqué, plusieurs choses doivent être faites simultanément.
-L’un en fait une pendant que l’autre en fait une autre, et tous contribuent à l’effet qu’un seul homme
-n’aurait pu produire. L’un rame pendant que l’autre tient le gouvernail, et qu’un troisième jette le filet
-on harponne le poisson, et la pêche a un succès impossible sans ce concours.” [Is it a question of
-undertaking a complex piece of labour? Many things must be done simultaneously. One person does
-one thing, while another does something else, and they all contribute to an effect that a single man
-would be unable to produce. One rows while the other holds the rudder, and a third casts the net or
-harpoons the fish; in this way fishing enjoys a success that would be impossible without this co-
-operation] (Destutt de Tracy, l.c.)
-10 “The doing of it (agricultural work) at the critical juncture is of so much the greater consequence.”
-(“An Inquiry into the Connexion between the Present Price,” &c., p. 9.) “In agriculture, there is no
-more important factor than that of time.” (Liebig: “Ueber Theorie und Praxis in der Landwirtschaft.”
-1856, p. 23.)
-11 “The next evil is one which one would scarcely expect to find in a country which exports more
-labour than any other in the world, with the exception, perhaps, of China and England ‒ the
-impossibility of procuring a sufficient number of hands to clean the cotton. The consequence of this is
-that large quantities of the crop are left unpicked, while another portion is gathered from the ground
-when it has fallen, and is of course discoloured and partially rotted, so that for want of labour at the
-proper season the cultivator is actually forced to submit to the loss of a large part of that crop for
-which England is so anxiously looking.” (“Bengal Hurkaru.” Bi-Monthly Overland Summary of
-News, 22nd July, 1861.)
-12 In the progress of culture “all, and perhaps more than all, the capital and labour which once loosely
-occupied 500 acres, are now concentrated for the more complete tillage of 100.” Although “relatively
-to the amount of capital and labour employed, space is concentrated, it is an enlarged sphere of
-production, as compared to the sphere of production formerly occupied or worked upon by one single
-independent agent of production.” (R. Jones: “An Essay on the Distribution of Wealth,” part I. On
-Rent. London, 1831. p. 191.)
-13 “La forza di ciascuno uomo è minima, ma la riunione delle minime forze forma una forza totale
-maggiore anche della somma delle forze medesime fino a che le forze per essere riunite possono
-diminuere il tempo ed accrescere lo spazio della loro azione.” (G. R. Carli, Note to P. Verri, l.c., t. xv.,
-p. 196.)
-14 “Profits ... is the sole end of trade.” (J. Vanderlint, l.c., p. 11.)
-15 That Philistine paper, the Spectator, states that after the introduction of a sort of partnership
-between capitalist and workmen in the “Wirework Company of Manchester,” “the first result was a
-sudden decrease in waste, the men not seeing why they should waste their own property any more
-than any other master’s, and waste is, perhaps, next to bad debts, the greatest source of manufacturing
-loss.” The same paper finds that the main defect in the Rochdale co-operative experiments is this:
-“They showed that associations of workmen could manage shops, mills, and almost all forms of
-industry with success, and they immediately improved the condition of the men; but then they did not
-leave a clear place for masters.” Quelle horreur!
-16 Professor Cairnes, after stating that the superintendence of labour is a leading feature of production
-by slaves in the Southern States of North America, continues: “The peasant proprietor (of the North),
-236 Chapter 13
-appropriating the whole produce of his toil, needs no other stimulus to exertion. Superintendence is
-here completely dispensed with.” (Cairnes, l.c., pp. 48, 49.)
-17 Sir James Steuart, a writer altogether remarkable for his quick eye for the characteristic social
-distinctions between different modes of production, says: “Why do large undertakings in the
-manufacturing way ruin private industry, but by coming nearer to the simplicity of slaves?” (“Prin. of
-Pol. Econ.,” London, 1767, v. I., pp. 167, 168.)
-18 Auguste Comte and his school might therefore have shown that feudal lords are an eternal necessity
-in the same way that they have done in the case of the lords of capital.
-19 R. Jones. “Textbook of Lectures,” &c., pp. 77, 78. The ancient Assyrian, Egyptian, and other
-collections in London, and in other European capitals, make us eye-witnesses of the modes of carrying
-on that co-operative labour.
-20 Linguet is improbably right, when in his “Théorie des Lois Civiles,” he declares hunting to be the
-first form of co-operation, and man-hunting (war) one of the earliest forms of hunting.
-21 Peasant agriculture on a small scale, and the carrying on of independent handicrafts, which together
-form the basis of the feudal mode of production, and after the dissolution of that system, continue side
-by side with the capitalist mode, also form the economic foundation of the classical communities at
-their best, after the primitive form of ownership of land in common had disappeared, and before
-slavery had seized on production in earnest.
-22 “Whether the united skill, industry, and emulation of many together on the same work be not the
-way to advance it? And whether it had been otherwise possible for England, to have carried on her
-Woollen Manufacture to so great a perfection?” (Berkeley. “The Querist.” London, 1751, p. 56, par.
-521.)
-Chapter 14: Division of Labour and Manufacture
-Section 1: Two-Fold Origin of Manufacture
-That co-operation which is based on division of labour, assumes its typical form in manufacture,
-and is the prevalent characteristic form of the capitalist process of production throughout the
-manufacturing period properly so called. That period, roughly speaking, extends from the middle
-of the 16th to the last third of the 18th century.
-Manufacture takes its rise in two ways:
-(1.) By the assemblage, in one workshop under the control of a single capitalist, of labourers
-belonging to various independent handicrafts, but through whose hands a given article must pass
-on its way to completion. A carriage, for example, was formerly the product of the labour of a
-great number of independent artificers, such as wheelwrights, harness-makers, tailors, locksmiths,
-upholsterers, turners, fringe-makers, glaziers, painters, polishers, gilders, &c. In the manufacture
-of carriages, however, all these different artificers are assembled in one building where they work
-into one another’s hands. It is true that a carriage cannot be gilt before it has been made. But if a
-number of carriages are being made simultaneously, some may be in the hands of the gilders
-while others are going through an earlier process. So far, we are still in the domain of simple co-
-operation, which finds its materials ready to hand in the shape of men and things. But very soon
-an important change takes place. The tailor, the locksmith, and the other artificers, being now
-exclusively occupied in carriage-making, each gradually loses, through want of practice, the
-ability to carry on, to its full extent, his old handicraft. But, on the other hand, his activity now
-confined in one groove, assumes the form best adapted to the narrowed sphere of action. At first,
-carriage manufacture is a combination of various independent handicrafts. By degrees, it becomes
-the splitting up of carriage-making into its various detail processes, each of which crystallises into
-the exclusive function of a particular workman, the manufacture, as a whole, being carried on by
-the men in conjunction. In the same way, cloth manufacture, as also a whole series of other
-manufactures, arose by combining different handicrafts together under the control of a single
-capitalist.1
-(2.) Manufacture also arises in a way exactly the reverse of this ‒ namely, by one capitalist
-employing simultaneously in one workshop a number of artificers, who all do the same, or the
-same kind of work, such as making paper, type, or needles. This is co-operation in its most
-elementary form. Each of these artificers (with the help, perhaps, of one or two apprentices),
-makes the entire commodity, and he consequently performs in succession all the operations
-necessary for its production. He still works in his old handicraft-like way. But very soon external
-circumstances cause a different use to be made of the concentration of the workmen on one spot,
-and of the simultaneousness of their work. An increased quantity of the article has perhaps to be
-delivered within a given time. The work is therefore re-distributed. Instead of each man being
-allowed to perform all the various operations in succession, these operations are changed into
-disconnected, isolated ones, carried on side by side; each is assigned to a different artificer, and
-the whole of them together are performed simultaneously by the co-operating workmen. This
-accidental repartition gets repeated, develops advantages of its own, and gradually ossifies into a
-systematic division of labour. The commodity, from being the individual product of an
-independent artificer, becomes the social product of a union of artificers, each of whom performs
-one, and only one, of the constituent partial operations. The same operations which, in the case of
-a papermaker belonging to a German Guild, merged one into the other as the successive acts of
-one artificer, became in the Dutch paper manufacture so many partial operations carried on side
-238 Chapter 14
-by side by numerous co-operating labourers. The needlemaker of the Nuremberg Guild was the
-cornerstone on which the English needle manufacture was raised. But while in Nuremberg that
-single artificer performed a series of perhaps 20 operations one after another, in England it was
-not long before there were 20 needlemakers side by side, each performing one alone of those 20
-operations, and in consequence of further experience, each of those 20 operations was again split
-up, isolated, and made the exclusive function of a separate workman.
-The mode in which manufacture arises, its growth out of handicrafts, is therefore two-fold. On the
-one hand, it arises from the union of various independent handicrafts, which become stripped of
-their independence and specialised to such an extent as to be reduced to mere supplementary
-partial processes in the production of one particular commodity. On the other hand, it arises from
-the co-operation of artificers of one handicraft; it splits up that particular handicraft into its
-various detail operations, isolating, and making these operations independent of one another up to
-the point where each becomes the exclusive function of a particular labourer. On the one hand,
-therefore, manufacture either introduces division of labour into a process of production, or further
-develops that division; on the other hand, it unites together handicrafts that were formerly
-separate. But whatever may have been its particular starting-point, its final form is invariably the
-same ‒ a productive mechanism whose parts are human beings.
-For a proper understanding of the division of labour in manufacture, it is essential that the
-following points be firmly grasped. First, the decomposition of a process of production into its
-various successive steps coincides, here, strictly with the resolution of a handicraft into its
-successive manual operations. Whether complex or simple, each operation has to be done by
-hand, retains the character of a handicraft, and is therefore dependent on the strength, skill,
-quickness, and sureness, of the individual workman in handling his tools. The handicraft
-continues to be the basis. This narrow technical basis excludes a really scientific analysis of any
-definite process of industrial production, since it is still a condition that each detail process gone
-through by the product must be capable of being done by hand and of forming, in its way, a
-separate handicraft. It is just because handicraft skill continues, in this way, to be the foundation
-of the process of production, that each workman becomes exclusively assigned to a partial
-function, and that for the rest of his life, his labour-power is turned into the organ of this detail
-function.
-Secondly, this division of labour is a particular sort of co-operation, and many of its
-disadvantages spring from the general character of co-operation, and not from this particular form
-of it.
-Section 2: The Detail Labourer and his Implements
-If we now go more into detail, it is, in the first place, clear that a labourer who all his life
-performs one and the same simple operation, converts his whole body into the automatic,
-specialised implement of that operation. Consequently, he takes less time in doing it, than the
-artificer who performs a whole series of operations in succession. But the collective labourer,
-who constitutes the living mechanism of manufacture, is made up solely of such specialised detail
-labourers. Hence, in comparison with the independent handicraft, more is produced in a given
-time, or the productive power of labour is increased.2 Moreover, when once this fractional work
-is established as the exclusive function of one person, the methods it employs become perfected.
-The workman’s continued repetition of the same simple act, and the concentration of his attention
-on it, teach him by experience how to attain the desired effect with the minimum of exertion. But
-since there are always several generations of labourers living at one time, and working together at
-239 Chapter 14
-the manufacture of a given article, the technical skill, the tricks of the trade thus acquired, become
-established, and are accumulated and handed down.3
-Manufacture, in fact, produces the skill of the detail labourer, by reproducing, and systematically
-driving to an extreme within the workshop, the naturally developed differentiation of trades
-which it found ready to hand in society at large. On the other hand, the conversion of fractional
-work into the life-calling of one man, corresponds to the tendency shown by earlier societies, to
-make trades hereditary; either to petrify them into castes, or whenever definite historical
-conditions beget in the individual a tendency to vary in a manner incompatible with the nature of
-castes, to ossify them into guilds. Castes and guilds arise from the action of the same natural law,
-that regulates the differentiation of plants and animals into species and varieties, except that,
-when a certain degree of development has been reached, the heredity of castes and the
-exclusiveness of guilds are ordained as a law of society.4
-“The muslins of Dakka in fineness, the calicoes and other piece goods of
-Coromandel in brilliant and durable colours, have never been surpassed. Yet they
-are produced without capital, machinery, division of labour, or any of those means
-which give such facilities to the manufacturing interest of Europe. The weaver is
-merely a detached individual, working a web when ordered of a customer, and
-with a loom of the rudest construction, consisting sometimes of a few branches or
-bars of wood, put roughly together. There is even no expedient for rolling up the
-warp; the loom must therefore be kept stretched to its full length, and becomes so
-inconveniently large, that it cannot be contained within the hut of the
-manufacturer, who is therefore compelled to ply his trade in the open air, where it
-is interrupted by every vicissitude of the weather.”5
-It is only the special skill accumulated from generation to generation, and transmitted from father
-to son, that gives to the Hindu, as it does to the spider, this proficiency. And yet the work of such
-a Hindu weaver is very complicated, compared with that of a manufacturing labourer.
-An artificer, who performs one after another the various fractional operations in the production of
-a finished article, must at one time change his place, at another his tools. The transition from one
-operation to another interrupts the flow of his labour, and creates, so to say, gaps in his working
-day. These gaps close up so soon as he is tied to one and the same operation all day long; they
-vanish in proportion as the changes in his work diminish. The resulting increased productive
-power is owing either to an increased expenditure of labour-power in a given time i.e., to
-increased intensity of labour or to a decrease in the amount of labour-power unproductively
-consumed. The extra expenditure of power, demanded by every transition from rest to motion, is
-made up for by prolonging the duration of the normal velocity when once acquired. On the other
-hand, constant labour of one uniform kind disturbs the intensity and flow of a man’s animal
-spirits, which find recreation and delight in mere change of activity.
-The productiveness of labour depends not only on the proficiency of the workman, but on the
-perfection of his tools. Tools of the same kind, such as knives, drills, gimlets, hammers, &c., may
-be employed in different processes; and the same tool may serve various purposes in a single
-process. But so soon as the different operations of a labour-process are disconnected the one from
-the other, and each fractional operation acquires in the hands of the detail labourer a suitable and
-peculiar form, alterations become necessary in the implements that previously served more than
-one purpose. The direction taken by this change is determined by the difficulties experienced in
-consequence of the unchanged form of the implement. Manufacture is characterised by the
-differentiation of the instruments of labour ‒ a differentiation whereby implements of a given sort
-acquire fixed shapes, adapted to each particular application, and by the specialisation of those
-240 Chapter 14
-instruments, giving to each special implement its full play only in the hands of a specific detail
-labourer. In Birmingham alone 500 varieties of hammers are produced, and not only is each
-adapted to one particular process, but several varieties often serve exclusively for the different
-operations in one and the same process. The manufacturing period simplifies, improves, and
-multiplies the implements of labour, by adapting them to the exclusively special functions of each
-detail labourer.6 It thus creates at the same time one of the material conditions for the existence of
-machinery, which consists of a combination of simple instruments.
-The detail labourer and his implements are the simplest elements of manufacture. Let us now turn
-to its aspect as a whole.
-Section 3: The Two Fundamental Forms of Manufacture:
-Heterogeneous Manufacture, Serial Manufacture
-The organisation of manufacture has two fundamental forms which, in spite of occasional
-blending, are essentially different in kind, and, moreover, play very distinct parts in the
-subsequent transformation of manufacture into modern industry carried on by machinery. This
-double character arises from the nature of the article produced. This article either results from the
-mere mechanical fitting together of partial products made independently, or owes its completed
-shape to a series of connected processes and manipulations.
-A locomotive, for instance, consists of more than 5,000 independent parts. It cannot, however,
-serve as an example of the first kind of genuine manufacture, for it is a structure produced by
-modern mechanical industry. But a watch can; and William Petty used it to illustrate the division
-of labour in manufacture. Formerly the individual work of a Nuremberg artificer, the watch has
-been transformed into the social product of an immense number of detail labourers, such as
-mainspring makers, dial makers, spiral spring makers, jewelled hole makers, ruby lever makers,
-hand makers, case makers, screw makers, gilders, with numerous subdivisions, such as wheel
-makers (brass and steel separate), pin makers, movement makers, acheveur de pignon (fixes the
-wheels on the axles, polishes the facets, &c.), pivot makers, planteur de finissage (puts the wheels
-and springs in the works), finisseur de barillet (cuts teeth in the wheels, makes the holes of the
-right size, &c.), escapement makers, cylinder makers for cylinder escapements, escapement wheel
-makers, balance wheel makers, raquette makers (apparatus for regulating the watch), the planteur
-d’échappement (escapement maker proper); then the repasseur de barillet (finishes the box for the
-spring, &c.), steel polishers, wheel polishers, screw polishers, figure painters, dial enamellers
-(melt the enamel on the copper), fabricant de pendants (makes the ring by which the case is
-hung), finisseur de charnière (puts the brass hinge in the cover, &c.), faiseur de secret (puts in the
-springs that open the case), graveur, ciseleur, polisseur de boîte, &c., &c., and last of all the
-repasseur, who fits together the whole watch and hands it over in a going state. Only a few parts
-of the watch pass through several hands; and all these membra disjecta come together for the first
-time in the hand that binds them into one mechanical whole. This external relation between the
-finished product, and its various and diverse elements makes it, as well in this case as in the case
-of all similar finished articles, a matter of chance whether the detail labourers are brought
-together in one workshop or not. The detail operations may further be carried on like so many
-independent handicrafts, as they are in the Cantons of Vaud and Neufchâtel; while in Geneva
-there exist large watch manufactories where the detail labourers directly co-operate under the
-control of a single capitalist. And even in the latter case the dial, the springs, and the case, are
-seldom made in the factory itself. To carry on the trade as a manufacture, with concentration of
-workmen, is, in the watch trade, profitable only under exceptional conditions, because
-241 Chapter 14
-competition is greater between the labourers who desire to work at home, and because the
-splitting up of the work into a number of heterogeneous processes, permits but little use of the
-instruments of labour in common, and the capitalist, by scattering the work, saves the outlay on
-workshops, &c.7 Nevertheless the position of this detail labourer who, though he works at home,
-does so for a capitalist (manufacturer, établisseur), is very different from that of the independent
-artificer, who works for his own customers.8
-The second kind of manufacture, its perfected form, produces articles that go through connected
-phases of development, through a series of processes step by step, like the wire in the
-manufacture of needles, which passes through the hands of 72 and sometimes even 92 different
-detail workmen.
-In so far as such a manufacture, when first started, combines scattered handicrafts, it lessens the
-space by which the various phases of production are separated from each other. The time taken in
-passing from one stage to another is shortened, so is the labour that effectuates this passage.9 In
-comparison with a handicraft, productive power is gained, and this gain is owing to the general
-co-operative character of manufacture. On the other hand, division of labour, which is the
-distinguishing principle of manufacture, requires the isolation of the various stages of production
-and their independence of each other. The establishment and maintenance of a connexion
-between the isolated functions necessitates the incessant transport of the article from one hand to
-another, and from one process to another. From the standpoint of modern mechanical industry,
-this necessity stands forth as a characteristic and costly disadvantage, and one that is immanent in
-the principle of manufacture.10
-If we confine our attention to some particular lot of raw materials, of rags, for instance, in paper
-manufacture, or of wire in needle manufacture, we perceive that it passes in succession through a
-series of stages in the hands of the various detail workmen until completion. On the other hand, if
-we look at the workshop as a whole, we see the raw material in all the stages of its production at
-the same time. The collective labourer, with one set of his many hands armed with one kind of
-tools, draws the wire, with another set, armed with different tools, he, at the same time,
-straightens it, with another, he cuts it, with another, points it, and so on. The different detail
-processes, which were successive in time, have become simultaneous, go on side by side in space.
-Hence, production of a greater quantum of finished commodities in a given time.11 This
-simultaneity, it is true, is due to the general co-operative form of the process as a whole; but
-Manufacture not only finds the conditions for co-operation ready to hand, it also, to some extent,
-creates them by the sub-division of handicraft labour. On the other hand, it accomplishes this
-social organisation of the labour-process only by riveting each labourer to a single fractional
-detail.
-Since the fractional product of each detail labourer is, at the same time, only a particular stage in
-the development of one and the same finished article, each labourer, or each group of labourers,
-prepares the raw material for another labourer or group. The result of the labour of the one is the
-starting-point for the labour of the other. The one workman therefore gives occupation directly to
-the other. The labour-time necessary in each partial process, for attaining the desired effect, is
-learnt by experience; and the mechanism of Manufacture, as a whole, is based on the assumption
-that a given result will be obtained in a given time. It is only on this assumption that the various
-supplementary labour-processes can proceed uninterruptedly, simultaneously, and side by side. It
-is clear that this direct dependence of the operations, and therefore of the labourers, on each other,
-compels each one of them to spend on his work no more than the necessary time, and thus a
-continuity, uniformity, regularity, order,12 and even intensity of labour, of quite a different kind,
-is begotten than is to be found in an independent handicraft or even in simple co-operation. The
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-rule, that the labour-time expended on a commodity should not exceed that which is socially
-necessary for its production, appears, in the production of commodities generally, to be
-established by the mere effect of competition; since, to express ourselves superficially, each
-single producer is obliged to sell his commodity at its market-price. In Manufacture, on the
-contrary, the turning out of a given quantum of product in a given time is a technical law of the
-process of production itself.13
-Different operations take, however, unequal periods, and yield therefore, in equal times unequal
-quantities of fractional products. If, therefore, the same labourer has, day after day, to perform the
-same operation, there must be a different number of labourers for each operation; for instance, in
-type manufacture, there are four founders and two breakers to one rubber: the founder casts 2,000
-type an hour, the breaker breaks up 4,000, and the rubber polishes 8,000. Here we have again the
-principle of co-operation in its simplest form, the simultaneous employment of many doing the
-same thing; only now, this principle is the expression of an organic relation. The division of
-labour, as carried out in Manufacture, not only simplifies and multiplies the qualitatively different
-parts of the social collective labourer, but also creates a fixed mathematical relation or ratio which
-regulates the quantitative extent of those parts i.e., the relative number of labourers, or the relative
-size of the group of labourers, for each detail operation. It develops, along with the qualitative
-sub-division of the social labour-process, a quantitative rule and proportionality for that process.
-When once the most fitting proportion has been experimentally established for the numbers of the
-detail labourers in the various groups when producing on a given scale, that scale can be extended
-only by employing a multiple of each particular group.14 There is this to boot, that the same
-individual can do certain kinds of work just as well on a large as on a small scale; for instance,
-the labour of superintendence, the carriage of the fractional product from one stage to the next,
-&c. The isolation of such functions, their allotment to a particular labourer, does not become
-advantageous till after an increase in the number of labourers employed; but this increase must
-affect every group proportionally.
-The isolated group of labourers to whom any particular detail function is assigned, is made up of
-homogeneous elements, and is one of the constituent parts of the total mechanism. In many
-manufactures, however, the group itself is an organised body of labour, the total mechanism
-being a repetition or multiplication of these elementary organisms. Take, for instance, the
-manufacture of glass bottles. It may be resolved into three essentially different stages. First, the
-preliminary stage, consisting of the preparation of the components of the glass, mixing the sand
-and lime, &c., and melting them into a fluid mass of glass.15 Various detail labourers are
-employed in this first stage, as also in the final one of removing the bottles from the drying
-furnace, sorting and packing them, &c. In the middle, between these two stages, comes the glass
-melting proper, the manipulation of the fluid mass. At each mouth of the furnace, there works a
-group, called “the hole,” consisting of one bottlemaker or finisher, one blower, one gatherer, one
-putter-up or whetter-off, and one taker-in. These five detail workers are so many special organs of
-a single working organism that acts only as a whole, and therefore can operate only by the direct
-co-operation of the whole five. The whole body is paralysed if but one of its members be
-wanting. But a glass furnace has several openings (in England from 4 to 6), each of which
-contains an earthenware melting-pot full of molten glass, and employs a similar five-membered
-group of workers. The organisation of each group is based on division of labour, but the bond
-between the different groups is simple co-operation, which, by using in common one of the
-means of production, the furnace, causes it to be more economically consumed. Such a furnace,
-with its 4-6 groups, constitutes a glass house; and a glass manufactory comprises a number of
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-such glass houses, together with the apparatus and workmen requisite for the preparatory and
-final stages.
-Finally, just as Manufacture arises in part from the combination of various handicrafts, so, too, it
-develops into a combination of various manufactures. The larger English glass manufacturers, for
-instance, make their own earthenware melting-pots, because, on the quality of these depends, to a
-great extent, the success or failure of the process. The manufacture of one of the means of
-production is here united with that of the product. On the other hand, the manufacture of the
-product may be united with other manufactures, of which that product is the raw material, or with
-the products of which it is itself subsequently mixed. Thus, we find the manufacture of flint glass
-combined with that of glass cutting and brass founding; the latter for the metal settings of various
-articles of glass. The various manufactures so combined form more or less separate departments
-of a larger manufacture, but are at the same time independent processes, each with its own
-division of labour. In spite of the many advantages offered by this combination of manufactures,
-it never grows into a complete technical system on its own foundation. That happens only on its
-transformation into an industry carried on by machinery.
-Early in the manufacturing period, the principle of lessening the necessary labour-time in the
-production of commodities16, was accepted and formulated: and the use of machines, especially
-for certain simple first processes that have to be conducted on a very large scale, and with the
-application of great force, sprang up here and there. Thus, at an early period in paper
-manufacture, the tearing up of the rags was done by paper-mills; and in metal works, the
-pounding of the ores was effected by stamping mills.17 The Roman Empire had handed down the
-elementary form of all machinery in the water-wheel.18
-The handicraft period bequeathed to us the great inventions of the compass, of gunpowder, of
-type-printing, and of the automatic clock. But, on the whole, machinery played that subordinate
-part which Adam Smith assigns to it in comparison with division of labour.19 The sporadic use of
-machinery in the 17th century was of the greatest importance, because it supplied the great
-mathematicians of that time with a practical basis and stimulant to the creation of the science of
-mechanics.
-The collective labourer, formed by the combination of a number of detail labourers, is the
-machinery specially characteristic of the manufacturing period. The various operations that are
-performed in turns by the producer of a commodity, and coalesce one with another during the
-progress of production, lay claim to him in various ways. In one operation he must exert more
-strength, in another more skill, in another more attention; and the same individual does not
-possess all these qualities in an equal degree. After Manufacture has once separated, made
-independent, and isolated the various operations, the labourers are divided, classified, and
-grouped according to their predominating qualities. If their natural endowments are, on the one
-hand, the foundation on which the division of labour is built up, on the other hand, Manufacture,
-once introduced, develops in them new powers that are by nature fitted only for limited and
-special functions. The collective labourer now possesses, in an equal degree of excellence, all the
-qualities requisite for production, and expends them in the most economical manner, by
-exclusively employing all his organs, consisting of particular labourers, or groups of labourers, in
-performing their special functions.20 The one-sidedness and the deficiencies of the detail labourer
-become perfections when he is a part of the collective labourer.21 The habit of doing only one
-thing converts him into a never failing instrument, while his connexion with the whole
-mechanism compels him to work with the regularity of the parts of a machine.22
-Since the collective labourer has functions, both simple and complex, both high and low, his
-members, the individual labour-powers, require different degrees of training, and must therefore
-244 Chapter 14
-have different values. Manufacture, therefore, develops a hierarchy of labour-powers, to which
-there corresponds a scale of wages. If, on the one hand, the individual labourers are appropriated
-and annexed for life by a limited function; on the other hand, the various operations of the
-hierarchy are parcelled out among the labourers according to both their natural and their acquired
-capabilities.23 Every process of production, however, requires certain simple manipulations,
-which every man is capable of doing. They too are now severed from their connexion with the
-more pregnant moments of activity, and ossified into exclusive functions of specially appointed
-labourers. Hence, Manufacture begets, in every handicraft that it seizes upon, a class of so-called
-unskilled labourers, a class which handicraft industry strictly excluded. If it develops a one-sided
-speciality into a perfection, at the expense of the whole of a man’s working capacity, it also
-begins to make a speciality of the absence of all development. Alongside of the hierarchic
-gradation there steps the simple separation of the labourers into skilled and unskilled. For the
-latter, the cost of apprenticeship vanishes; for the former, it diminishes, compared with that of
-artificers, in consequence of the functions being simplified. In both cases the value of labour-
-power falls.24 An exception to this law holds good whenever the decomposition of the labour-
-process begets new and comprehensive functions, that either had no place at all, or only a very
-modest one, in handicrafts. The fall in the value of labour-power, caused by the disappearance or
-diminution of the expenses of apprenticeship, implies a direct increase of surplus-value for the
-benefit of capital; for everything that shortens the necessary labour-time required for the
-reproduction of labour-power, extends the domain of surplus labour.
-Section 4: Division of Labour in Manufacture, and Division of
-Labour in Society
-We first considered the origin of Manufacture, then its simple elements, then the detail labourer
-and his implements, and finally, the totality of the mechanism. We shall now lightly touch upon
-the relation between the division of labour in manufacture, and the social division of labour,
-which forms the foundation of all production of commodities.
-If we keep labour alone in view, we may designate the separation of social production into its
-main divisions or genera – viz., agriculture, industries, &c., as division of labour in general, and
-the splitting up of these families into species and sub-species, as division of labour in particular,
-and the division of labour within the workshop as division of labour in singular or in detail.25
-Division of labour in a society, and the corresponding tying down of individuals to a particular
-calling, develops itself, just as does the division of labour in manufacture, from opposite starting-
-points. Within a family,26 and after further development within a tribe, there springs up naturally
-a division of labour, caused by differences of sex and age, a division that is consequently based
-on a purely physiological foundation, which division enlarges its materials by the expansion of
-the community, by the increase of population, and more especially, by the conflicts between
-different tribes, and the subjugation of one tribe by another. On the other hand, as I have before
-remarked, the exchange of products springs up at the points where different families, tribes,
-communities, come in contact; for, in the beginning of civilisation, it is not private individuals but
-families, tribes, &c., that meet on an independent footing. Different communities find different
-means of production, and different means of subsistence in their natural environment. Hence,
-their modes of production, and of living, and their products are different. It is this spontaneously
-developed difference which, when different communities come in contact, calls forth the mutual
-exchange of products, and the consequent gradual conversion of those products into commodities.
-Exchange does not create the differences between the spheres of production, but brings what are
-245 Chapter 14
-already different into relation, and thus converts them into more or less inter-dependent branches
-of the collective production of an enlarged society. In the latter case, the social division of labour
-arises from the exchange between spheres of production, that are originally distinct and
-independent of one another. In the former, where the physiological division of labour is the
-starting-point, the particular organs of a compact whole grow loose, and break off, principally
-owing to the exchange of commodities with foreign communities, and then isolate themselves so
-far, that the sole bond, still connecting the various kinds of work, is the exchange of the products
-as commodities. In the one case, it is the making dependent what was before independent; in the
-other case, the making independent what was before dependent.
-The foundation of every division of labour that is well developed, and brought about by the
-exchange of commodities, is the separation between town and country.27 It may be said, that the
-whole economic history of society is summed up in the movement of this antithesis. We pass it
-over, however, for the present.
-Just as a certain number of simultaneously employed labourers are the material pre-requisites for
-division of labour in manufacture, so are the number and density of the population, which here
-correspond to the agglomeration in one workshop, a necessary condition for the division of labour
-in society.28 Nevertheless, this density is more or less relative. A relatively thinly populated
-country, with well-developed means of communication, has a denser population than a more
-numerously populated country, with badly-developed means of communication; and in this sense
-the Northern States of the American Union, for instance, are more thickly populated than India.29
-Since the production and the circulation of commodities are the general pre-requisites of the
-capitalist mode of production, division of labour in manufacture demands, that division of labour
-in society at large should previously have attained a certain degree of development. Inversely, the
-former division reacts upon and develops and multiplies the latter. Simultaneously, with the
-differentiation of the instruments of labour, the industries that produce these instruments, become
-more and more differentiated.30 If the manufacturing system seize upon an industry, which,
-previously, was carried on in connexion with others, either as a chief or as a subordinate industry,
-and by one producer, these industries immediately separate their connexion, and become
-independent. If it seize upon a particular stage in the production of a commodity, the other stages
-of its production become converted into so many independent industries. It has already been
-stated, that where the finished article consists merely of a number of parts fitted together, the
-detail operations may re-establish themselves as genuine and separate handicrafts. In order to
-carry out more perfectly the division of labour in manufacture, a single branch of production is,
-according to the varieties of its raw material, or the various forms that one and the same raw
-material may assume, split up into numerous, and to some extent, entirely new manufactures.
-Accordingly, in France alone, in the first half of the 18th century, over 100 different kinds of silk
-stuffs were woven, and, in Avignon, it was law, that “every apprentice should devote himself to
-only one sort of fabrication, and should not learn the preparation of several kinds of stuff at
-once.” The territorial division of labour, which confines special branches of production to special
-districts of a country, acquires fresh stimulus from the manufacturing system, which exploits
-every special advantage.31 The Colonial system and the opening out of the markets of the world,
-both of which are included in the general conditions of existence of the manufacturing period,
-furnish rich material for developing the division of labour in society. It is not the place, here, to
-go on to show how division of labour seizes upon, not only the economic, but every other sphere
-of society, and everywhere lays the foundation of that all engrossing system of specialising and
-sorting men, that development in a man of one single faculty at the expense of all other faculties,
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-which caused A. Ferguson, the master of Adam Smith, to exclaim: “We make a nation of Helots,
-and have no free citizens.”32
-But, in spite of the numerous analogies and links connecting them, division of labour in the
-interior of a society, and that in the interior of a workshop, differ not only in degree, but also in
-kind. The analogy appears most indisputable where there is an invisible bond uniting the various
-branches of trade. For instance the cattle-breeder produces hides, the tanner makes the hides into
-leather, and the shoemaker, the leather into boots. Here the thing produced by each of them is but
-a step towards the final form, which is the product of all their labours combined. There are,
-besides, all the various industries that supply the cattle-breeder, the tanner, and the shoemaker
-with the means of production. Now it is quite possible to imagine, with Adam Smith, that the
-difference between the above social division of labour, and the division in manufacture, is merely
-subjective, exists merely for the observer, who, in a manufacture, can see with one glance, all the
-numerous operations being performed on one spot, while in the instance given above, the
-spreading out of the work over great areas, and the great number of people employed in each
-branch of labour, obscure the connexion.33 But what is it that forms the bond between the
-independent labours of the cattle-breeder, the tanner, and the shoemaker? It is the fact that their
-respective products are commodities. What, on the other hand, characterises division of labour in
-manufactures? The fact that the detail labourer produces no commodities.34 It is only the common
-product of all the detail labourers that becomes a commodity.35 Division of labour in society is
-brought about by the purchase and sale of the products of different branches of industry, while the
-connexion between the detail operations in a workshop, is due to the sale of the labour-power of
-several workmen to one capitalist, who applies it as combined labour-power. The division of
-labour in the workshop implies concentration of the means of production in the hands of one
-capitalist; the division of labour in society implies their dispersion among many independent
-producers of commodities. While within the workshop, the iron law of proportionality subjects
-definite numbers of workmen to definite functions, in the society outside the workshop, chance
-and caprice have full play in distributing the producers and their means of production among the
-various branches of industry. The different spheres of production, it is true, constantly tend to an
-equilibrium: for, on the one hand, while each producer of a commodity is bound to produce a use-
-value, to satisfy a particular social want, and while the extent of these wants differs quantitatively,
-still there exists an inner relation which settles their proportions into a regular system, and that
-system one of spontaneous growth; and, on the other hand, the law of the value of commodities
-ultimately determines how much of its disposable working-time society can expend on each
-particular class of commodities. But this constant tendency to equilibrium, of the various spheres
-of production, is exercised, only in the shape of a reaction against the constant upsetting of this
-equilibrium. The a priori system on which the division of labour, within the workshop, is
-regularly carried out, becomes in the division of labour within the society, an a posteriori, nature-
-imposed necessity, controlling the lawless caprice of the producers, and perceptible in the
-barometrical fluctuations of the market-prices. Division of labour within the workshop implies
-the undisputed authority of the capitalist over men, that are but parts of a mechanism that belongs
-to him. The division of labour within the society brings into contact independent commodity-
-producers, who acknowledge no other authority but that of competition, of the coercion exerted
-by the pressure of their mutual interests; just as in the animal kingdom, the bellum omnium contra
-omnes [war of all against all – Hobbes] more or less preserves the conditions of existence of
-every species. The same bourgeois mind which praises division of labour in the workshop, life-
-long annexation of the labourer to a partial operation, and his complete subjection to capital, as
-being an organisation of labour that increases its productiveness ‒ that same bourgeois mind
-denounces with equal vigour every conscious attempt to socially control and regulate the process
-247 Chapter 14
-of production, as an inroad upon such sacred things as the rights of property, freedom and
-unrestricted play for the bent of the individual capitalist. It is very characteristic that the
-enthusiastic apologists of the factory system have nothing more damning to urge against a general
-organisation of the labour of society, than that it would turn all society into one immense factory.
-If, in a society with capitalist production, anarchy in the social division of labour and despotism
-in that of the workshop are mutual conditions the one of the other, we find, on the contrary, in
-those earlier forms of society in which the separation of trades has been spontaneously developed,
-then crystallised, and finally made permanent by law, on the one hand, a specimen of the
-organisation of the labour of society, in accordance with an approved and authoritative plan, and
-on the other, the entire exclusion of division of labour in the workshop, or at all events a mere
-dwarflike or sporadic and accidental development of the same.36
-Those small and extremely ancient Indian communities, some of which have continued down to
-this day, are based on possession in common of the land, on the blending of agriculture and
-handicrafts, and on an unalterable division of labour, which serves, whenever a new community
-is started, as a plan and scheme ready cut and dried. Occupying areas of from 100 up to several
-thousand acres, each forms a compact whole producing all it requires. The chief part of the
-products is destined for direct use by the community itself, and does not take the form of a
-commodity. Hence, production here is independent of that division of labour brought about, in
-Indian society as a whole, by means of the exchange of commodities. It is the surplus alone that
-becomes a commodity, and a portion of even that, not until it has reached the hands of the State,
-into whose hands from time immemorial a certain quantity of these products has found its way in
-the shape of rent in kind. The constitution of these communities varies in different parts of India.
-In those of the simplest form, the land is tilled in common, and the produce divided among the
-members. At the same time, spinning and weaving are carried on in each family as subsidiary
-industries. Side by side with the masses thus occupied with one and the same work, we find the
-“chief inhabitant,” who is judge, police, and tax-gatherer in one; the book-keeper, who keeps the
-accounts of the tillage and registers everything relating thereto; another official, who prosecutes
-criminals, protects strangers travelling through and escorts them to the next village; the boundary
-man, who guards the boundaries against neighbouring communities; the water-overseer, who
-distributes the water from the common tanks for irrigation; the Brahmin, who conducts the
-religious services; the schoolmaster, who on the sand teaches the children reading and writing;
-the calendar-Brahmin, or astrologer, who makes known the lucky or unlucky days for seed-time
-and harvest, and for every other kind of agricultural work; a smith and a carpenter, who make and
-repair all the agricultural implements; the potter, who makes all the pottery of the village; the
-barber, the washerman, who washes clothes, the silversmith, here and there the poet, who in some
-communities replaces the silversmith, in others the schoolmaster. This dozen of individuals is
-maintained at the expense of the whole community. If the population increases, a new community
-is founded, on the pattern of the old one, on unoccupied land. The whole mechanism discloses a
-systematic division of labour; but a division like that in manufactures is impossible, since the
-smith and the carpenter, &c., find an unchanging market, and at the most there occur, according
-to the sizes of the villages, two or three of each, instead of one.37 The law that regulates the
-division of labour in the community acts with the irresistible authority of a law of Nature, at the
-same time that each individual artificer, the smith, the carpenter, and so on, conducts in his
-workshop all the operations of his handicraft in the traditional way, but independently, and
-without recognising any authority over him. The simplicity of the organisation for production in
-these self-sufficing communities that constantly reproduce themselves in the same form, and
-when accidentally destroyed, spring up again on the spot and with the same name38 ‒ this
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-simplicity supplies the key to the secret of the unchangeableness of Asiatic societies, an
-unchangeableness in such striking contrast with the constant dissolution and refounding of Asiatic
-States, and the never-ceasing changes of dynasty. The structure of the economic elements of
-society remains untouched by the storm-clouds of the political sky.
-The rules of the guilds, as I have said before, by limiting most strictly the number of apprentices
-and journeymen that a single master could employ, prevented him from becoming a capitalist.
-Moreover, he could not employ his journeymen in many other handicrafts than the one in which
-he was a master. The guilds zealously repelled every encroachment by the capital of merchants,
-the only form of free capital with which they came in contact. A merchant could buy every kind
-of commodity, but labour as a commodity he could not buy. He existed only on sufferance, as a
-dealer in the products of the handicrafts. If circumstances called for a further division of labour,
-the existing guilds split themselves up into varieties, or founded new guilds by the side of the old
-ones; all this, however, without concentrating various handicrafts in a single workshop. Hence,
-the guild organisation, however much it may have contributed by separating, isolating, and
-perfecting the handicrafts, to create the material conditions for the existence of manufacture,
-excluded division of labour in the workshop. On the whole, the labourer and his means of
-production remained closely united, like the snail with its shell, and thus there was wanting the
-principal basis of manufacture, the separation of the labourer from his means of production, and
-the conversion of these means into capital.
-While division of labour in society at large, whether such division be brought about or not by
-exchange of commodities, is common to economic formations of society the most diverse,
-division of labour in the workshop, as practised by manufacture, is a special creation of the
-capitalist mode of production alone.
-Section 5: The Capitalistic Character of Manufacture
-An increased number of labourers under the control of one capitalist is the natural starting-point,
-as well of co-operation generally, as of manufacture in particular. But the division of labour in
-manufacture makes this increase in the number of workmen a technical necessity. The minimum
-number that any given capitalist is bound to employ is here prescribed by the previously
-established division of labour. On the other hand, the advantages of further division are
-obtainable only by adding to the number of workmen, and this can be done only by adding
-multiples of the various detail groups. But an increase in the variable component of the capital
-employed necessitates an increase in its constant component, too, in the workshops, implements,
-&c., and, in particular, in the raw material, the call for which grows quicker than the number of
-workmen. The quantity of it consumed in a given time, by a given amount of labour, increases in
-the same ratio as does the productive power of that labour in consequence of its division. Hence,
-it is a law, based on the very nature of manufacture, that the minimum amount of capital, which is
-bound to be in the hands of each capitalist, must keep increasing; in other words, that the
-transformation into capital of the social means of production and subsistence must keep
-extending.39
-In manufacture, as well as in simple co-operation, the collective working organism is a form of
-existence of capital. The mechanism that is made up of numerous individual detail labourers
-belongs to the capitalist. Hence, the productive power resulting from a combination of labours
-appears to be the productive power of capital. Manufacture proper not only subjects the
-previously independent workman to the discipline and command of capital, but, in addition,
-creates a hierarchic gradation of the workmen themselves. While simple co-operation leaves the
-mode of working by the individual for the most part unchanged, manufacture thoroughly
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-revolutionises it, and seizes labour-power by its very roots. It converts the labourer into a crippled
-monstrosity, by forcing his detail dexterity at the expense of a world of productive capabilities
-and instincts; just as in the States of La Plata they butcher a whole beast for the sake of his hide or
-his tallow. Not only is the detail work distributed to the different individuals, but the individual
-himself is made the automatic motor of a fractional operation,40 and the absurd fable of Menenius
-Agrippa, which makes man a mere fragment of his own body, becomes realised.41 If, at first, the
-workman sells his labour-power to capital, because the material means of producing a commodity
-fail him, now his very labour-power refuses its services unless it has been sold to capital. Its
-functions can be exercised only in an environment that exists in the workshop of the capitalist
-after the sale. By nature unfitted to make anything independently, the manufacturing labourer
-develops productive activity as a mere appendage of the capitalist’s workshop.42 As the chosen
-people bore in their features the sign manual of Jehovah, so division of labour brands the
-manufacturing workman as the property of capital.
-The knowledge, the judgement, and the will, which, though in ever so small a degree, are
-practised by the independent peasant or handicraftsman, in the same way as the savage makes the
-whole art of war consist in the exercise of his personal cunning these faculties are now required
-only for the workshop as a whole. Intelligence in production expands in one direction, because it
-vanishes in many others. What is lost by the detail labourers, is concentrated in the capital that
-employs them.43 It is a result of the division of labour in manufactures, that the labourer is
-brought face to face with the intellectual potencies of the material process of production, as the
-property of another, and as a ruling power. This separation begins in simple co-operation, where
-the capitalist represents to the single workman, the oneness and the will of the associated labour.
-It is developed in manufacture which cuts down the labourer into a detail labourer. It is completed
-in modern industry, which makes science a productive force distinct from labour and presses it
-into the service of capital.44
-In manufacture, in order to make the collective labourer, and through him capital, rich in social
-productive power, each labourer must be made poor in individual productive powers.
-“Ignorance is the mother of industry as well as of superstition. Reflection and
-fancy are subject to err; but a habit of moving the hand or the foot is independent
-of either. Manufactures, accordingly, prosper most where the mind is least
-consulted, and where the workshop may ... be considered as an engine, the parts of
-which are men.”45
-As a matter of fact, some few manufacturers in the middle of the 18th century preferred, for
-certain operations that were trade secrets, to employ half-idiotic persons.46
-“The understandings of the greater part of men,” says Adam Smith, “are
-necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose whole life is
-spent in performing a few simple operations ... has no occasion to exert his
-understanding... He generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a
-human creature to become.”
-After describing the stupidity of the detail labourer he goes on:
-“The uniformity of his stationary life naturally corrupts the courage of his mind...
-It corrupts even the activity of his body and renders him incapable of exerting his
-strength with vigour and perseverance in any other employments than that to
-which he has been bred. His dexterity at his own particular trade seems in this
-manner to be acquired at the expense of his intellectual, social, and martial
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-virtues. But in every improved and civilised society, this is the state into which the
-labouring poor, that is, the great body of the people, must necessarily fall.”47
-For preventing the complete deterioration of the great mass of the people by division of labour, A.
-Smith recommends education of the people by the State, but prudently, and in homeopathic
-doses. G. Garnier, his French translator and commentator, who, under the first French Empire,
-quite naturally developed into a senator, quite as naturally opposes him on this point. Education
-of the masses, he urges, violates the first law of the division of labour, and with it
-“our whole social system would be proscribed.” "Like all other divisions of
-labour,” he says, “that between hand labour and head labour 48 is more
-pronounced and decided in proportion as society (he rightly uses this word, for
-capital, landed property and their State) becomes richer. This division of labour,
-like every other, is an effect of past, and a cause of future progress... ought the
-government then to work in opposition to this division of labour, and to hinder its
-natural course? Ought it to expend a part of the public money in the attempt to
-confound and blend together two classes of labour, which are striving after
-division and separation?”49
-Some crippling of body and mind is inseparable even from division of labour in society as a
-whole. Since, however, manufacture carries this social separation of branches of labour much
-further, and also, by its peculiar division, attacks the individual at the very roots of his life50, it is
-the first to afford the materials for, and to give a start to, industrial pathology.
-“To subdivide a man is to execute him, if he deserves the sentence, to assassinate
-him if he does not... The subdivision of labour is the assassination of a people.” 51
-Co-operation based on division of labour, in other words, manufacture, commences as a
-spontaneous formation. So soon as it attains some consistence and extension, it becomes the
-recognised methodical and systematic form of capitalist production. History shows how the
-division of labour peculiar to manufacture, strictly so called, acquires the best adapted form at
-first by experience, as it were behind the backs of the actors, and then, like the guild handicrafts,
-strives to hold fast that form when once found, and here and there succeeds in keeping it for
-centuries. Any alteration in this form, except in trivial matters, is solely owing to a revolution in
-the instruments of labour. Modern manufacture wherever it arises ‒ I do not here allude to
-modern industry based on machinery ‒ either finds the disjecta membra poetae ready to hand, and
-only waiting to be collected together, as is the case in the manufacture of clothes in large towns,
-or it can easily apply the principle of division, simply by exclusively assigning the various
-operations of a handicraft (such as book-binding) to particular men. In such cases, a week’s
-experience is enough to determine the proportion between the numbers of the hands necessary for
-the various functions.52
-By decomposition of handicrafts, by specialisation of the instruments of labour, by the formation
-of detail labourers, and by grouping and combining the latter into a single mechanism, division of
-labour in manufacture creates a qualitative gradation, and a quantitative proportion in the social
-process of production; it consequently creates a definite organisation of the labour of society, and
-thereby develops at the same time new productive forces in the society. In its specific capitalist
-form ‒ and under the given conditions, it could take no other form than a capitalistic one ‒
-manufacture is but a particular method of begetting relative surplus-value, or of augmenting at the
-expense of the labourer the self-expansion of capital ‒ usually called social wealth, “Wealth of
-Nations,” &c. It increases the social productive power of labour, not only for the benefit of the
-capitalist instead of for that of the labourer, but it does this by crippling the individual labourers.
-It creates new conditions for the lordship of capital over labour. If, therefore, on the one hand, it
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-presents itself historically as a progress and as a necessary phase in the economic development of
-society, on the other hand, it is a refined and civilised method of exploitation.
-Political Economy, which as an independent science, first sprang into being during the period of
-manufacture, views the social division of labour only from the standpoint of manufacture,53 and
-sees in it only the means of producing more commodities with a given quantity of labour, and,
-consequently, of cheapening commodities and hurrying on the accumulation of capital. In most
-striking contrast with this accentuation of quantity and exchange-value, is the attitude of the
-writers of classical antiquity, who hold exclusively by quality and use-value.54 In consequence of
-the separation of the social branches of production, commodities are better made, the various
-bents and talents of men select a suitable field,55 and without some restraint no important results
-can be obtained anywhere.56 Hence both product and producer are improved by division of
-labour. If the growth of the quantity produced is occasionally mentioned, this is only done with
-reference to the greater abundance of use-values. There is not a word alluding to exchange-value
-or to the cheapening of commodities. This aspect, from the standpoint of use-value alone, is taken
-as well by Plato,57 who treats division of labour as the foundation on which the division of
-society into classes is based, as by Xenophon58, who with characteristic bourgeois instinct,
-approaches more nearly to division of labour within the workshop. Plato’s Republic, in so far as
-division of labour is treated in it, as the formative principle of the State, is merely the Athenian
-idealisation of the Egyptian system of castes, Egypt having served as the model of an industrial
-country to many of his contemporaries also, amongst others to Isocrates,59 and it continued to
-have this importance to the Greeks of the Roman Empire.60
-During the manufacturing period proper, i.e., the period during which manufacture is the
-predominant form taken by capitalist production, many obstacles are opposed to the full
-development of the peculiar tendencies of manufacture. Although manufacture creates, as we
-have already seen, a simple separation of the labourers into skilled and unskilled, simultaneously
-with their hierarchic arrangement in classes, yet the number of the unskilled labourers, owing to
-the preponderating influence of the skilled, remains very limited. Although it adapts the detail
-operations to the various degrees of maturity, strength, and development of the living instruments
-of labour, thus conducing to exploitation of women and children, yet this tendency as a whole is
-wrecked on the habits and the resistance of the male labourers. Although the splitting up of
-handicrafts lowers the cost of forming the workman, and thereby lowers his value, yet for the
-more difficult detail work, a longer apprenticeship is necessary, and, even where it would be
-superfluous, is jealously insisted upon by the workmen. In England, for instance, we find the laws
-of apprenticeship, with their seven years’ probation, in full force down to the end of the
-manufacturing period; and they are not thrown on one side till the advent of Modern Industry.
-Since handicraft skill is the foundation of manufacture, and since the mechanism of manufacture
-as a whole possesses no framework, apart from the labourers themselves, capital is constantly
-compelled to wrestle with the insubordination of the workmen.
-“By the infirmity of human nature,” says friend Ure, “it happens that the more
-skilful the workman, the more self-willed and intractable he is apt to become, and
-of course the less fit a component of a mechanical system in which ... he may do
-great damage to the whole”61
-Hence throughout the whole manufacturing period there runs the complaint of want of discipline
-among the workmen62. And had we not the testimony of contemporary writers, the simple facts,
-that during the period between the 16th century and the epoch of Modern Industry, capital failed
-to become the master of the whole disposable working-time of the manufacturing labourers, that
-manufactures are short-lived, and change their locality from one country to another with the
-252 Chapter 14
-emigrating or immigrating workmen, these facts would speak volumes. “Order must in one way
-or another be established,” exclaims in 1770 the oft-cited author of the “Essay on Trade and
-Commerce.” “Order,” re-echoes Dr. Andrew Ure 66 years later, “Order” was wanting in
-manufacture based on “the scholastic dogma of division of labour,” and “Arkwright created
-order.”
-At the same time manufacture was unable, either to seize upon the production of society to its full
-extent, or to revolutionise that production to its very core. It towered up as an economic work of
-art, on the broad foundation of the town handicrafts, and of the rural domestic industries. At a
-given stage in its development, the narrow technical basis on which manufacture rested, came
-into conflict with requirements of production that were created by manufacture itself.
-One of its most finished creations was the workshop for the production of the instruments of
-labour themselves, including especially the complicated mechanical apparatus then already
-employed.
-A machine-factory, says Ure, “displayed the division of labour in manifold
-gradations ‒ the file, the drill, the lathe, having each its different workman in the
-order of skill.” (P. 21.)
-This workshop, the product of the division of labour in manufacture, produced in its turn ‒
-machines. It is they that sweep away the handicraftsman’s work as the regulating principle of
-social production. Thus, on the one hand, the technical reason for the life-long annexation of the
-workman to a detail function is removed. On the other hand, the fetters that this same principle
-laid on the dominion of capital, fall away.
-1 To give a more modern instance: The silk spinning and weaving of Lyon and Nîmes “est toute
-patriarcale; elle emploie beaucoup de femmes et d’enfants, mais sans les épuiser ni les corrompre; elle
-les laisse dans leur belles valises de la Drôme, du Var, de l’Isère, de Vaucluse, pour y élever des vers
-et dévider leurs cocons; jamais elle n’entre dans une véritable fabrique. Pour être aussi bien observé ...
-le principe de la division du travail s’y revêt d’un caractère spécial. Il y a bien des dévideuses, des
-moulineurs, des teinturiers, des encolleurs, puis des tisserands; mais ils ne sont pas réunis dans un
-même établissement, ne dépendent pas d’un même maître, tous ils sont indépendants” [... is entirely
-patriarchal; it employs a large number of women and children, but without exhausting or ruining
-them; it allows them to stay in their beautiful valleys of the Drôme, the Var, the Isère, the Vaucluse,
-cultuvating their silkworms and unwinding their cocoons; it never becomes a true factory industry.
-However, the principle of the division of labour takes on a special character here. There do indeed
-exist winders, throwsters. dyers, sizers, and finally weavers; but they are not assembled in the same
-workshop, nor are they dependent on a single master; they are all independent] (A. Blanqui: “Cours,
-d’Econ. Industrielle.” Recueilli par A. Blaise. Paris, 1838-39, p. 79.) Since Blanqui wrote this, the
-various independent labourers have, to some extent, been united in factories. [And since Marx wrote
-the above, the power-loom has invaded these factories, and is now 1886 rapidly superseding the hand-
-loom. (Added in the 4th German edition. The Krefeld silk industry also has its tale to tell anent this
-subject.) F. E.]
-2 “The more any manufacture of much variety shall be distributed and assigned to different artists, the
-same must needs be better done and with greater expedition, with less loss of time and labour.” (“The
-Advantages of the East India Trade,” Lond., 1720, p. 71.)
-3 “Easy labour is transmitted skill.” (Th. Hodgskin, “Popular Political Economy,” p. 48.)
-4 “The arts also have ... in Egypt reached the requisite degree of perfection. For it is the only country
-where artificers may not in any way meddle with the affairs of another class of citizens, but must
-253 Chapter 14
-follow that calling alone which by law is hereditary in their clan.... In other countries it is found that
-tradesmen divide their attention between too many objects. At one time they try agriculture, at another
-they take to commerce, at another they busy themselves with two or three occupations at once. In free
-countries, they mostly frequent the assemblies of the people.... In Egypt, on the contrary, every
-artificer is severely punished if he meddles with affairs of State, or carries on several trades at once.
-Thus there is nothing to disturb their application to their calling.... Moreover, since, they inherit from
-their forefathers numerous rules, they are eager to discover fresh advantages” (Diodorus Siculus: Bibl.
-Hist. I. 1. c., 74.)
-5 “Historical and descriptive account of Brit. India, &c.,” by Hugh Murray and James Wilson, &c.,
-Edinburgh 1832, v. II., p. 449. The Indian loom is upright, i.e., the warp is stretched vertically.
-6 Darwin in his epoch-making work on the origin of species, remarks, with reference to the natural
-organs of plants and animals: “So long as one and the same organ has different kinds of work to
-perform, a ground for its changeability may possibly be found in this, that natural selection preserves
-or suppresses each small variation of form less carefully than if that organ were destined for one
-special purpose alone. Thus, knives that are adapted to cut all sorts of things, may, on the whole, be of
-one shape; but an implement destined to be used exclusively in one way must have a different shape
-for every different use.”
-7 In the year 1854 Geneva produced 80,000 watches, which is not one-fifth of the production in the
-Canton of Neufchâtel. La Chaux-de-Fond alone, which we may look upon as a huge watch
-manufactory, produces yearly twice as many as Geneva. From 1850-61 Geneva produced 720,000
-watches. See “Report from Geneva on the Watch Trade” in “Reports by H. M.’s Secretaries of
-Embassy and Legation on the Manufactures, Commerce, &c., No. 6, 1863.” The want of connexion
-alone, between the processes into which the production of articles that merely consist of parts fitted
-together is split up, makes it very difficult to convert such a manufacture into a branch of modem
-industry carried on by machinery; but in the case of a watch there are two other impediments in
-addition, the minuteness and delicacy of its parts, and its character as an article of luxury. Hence their
-variety, which is such, that in the best London houses scarcely a dozen watches are made alike in the
-course of a year. The watch manufactory of Messrs. Vacheron & Constantin, in which machinery has
-been employed with success, produces at the most three or four different varieties of size and form.
-8 In watchmaking, that classical example of heterogeneous manufacture, we may study with great
-accuracy the above-mentioned differentiation and specialisation of the instruments of labour caused
-by the sub-division of handicrafts.
-9 “In so close a cohabitation of the people, the carriage must needs be less.” (“The Advantages of the
-East India Trade,” p. 106.)
-10 “The isolation of the different stages of manufacture, consequent upon the employment of manual
-labour, adds immensely to the cost of production, the loss mainly arising from the mere removals from
-one process to another.” (“The Industry of Nations.” Lond., 1855, Part II, p. 200.)
-11 “It (the division of labour) produces also an economy of time by separating the work into its
-different branches, all of which may be carried on into execution at the same moment.... By carrying
-on all the different processes at once, which an individual must have executed separately, it becomes
-possible to produce a multitude of pins completely finished in the same time as a single pin might
-have been either cut or pointed.” (Dugald Stewart, l.c., p. 319.)
-12 “The more variety of artists to every manufacture... the greater the order and regularity of every
-work, the same must needs be done in less time, the labour must be less.” (“The Advantages,” &c., p.
-68.)
-254 Chapter 14
-13 Nevertheless, the manufacturing system, in many branches of industry, attains this result but very
-imperfectly, because it knows not how to control with certainty the general chemical and physical
-conditions of the process of production.
-14 “When (from the peculiar nature of the produce of each manufactory), the number of processes into
-which it is most advantageous to divide it is ascertained, as well as the number of individuals to be
-employed, then all other manufactories which do not employ a direct multiple of this number will
-produce the article at a greater cost.... Hence arises one of the causes of the great size of
-manufacturing establishments.” (C. Babbage. “On the Economy of Machinery,” 1st ed. London. 1832.
-Ch. xxi, pp. 172-73.)
-15 In England, the melting-furnace is distinct from the glass-furnace in which the glass is manipulated.
-In Belgium, one and the same furnace serves for both processes.
-16 This can be seen from W. Petty, John Bellers, Andrew Yarranton, “The Advantages of the East
-India Trade,” and J. Vanderlint, not to mention others.
-17 Towards the end of the 16th century, mortars and sieves were still used in France for pounding and
-washing ores.
-18 The whole history of the development of machinery can be traced in the history of the corn mill.
-The factory in England is still a “mill.” In German technological works of the first decade of this
-century, the term “Mühle” is still found in use, not only for all machinery driven by the forces of
-Nature, but also for all manufactures where apparatus in the nature of machinery is applied.
-19 As will be seen more in detail in the fourth book of this work, Adam Smith has not established a
-single new proposition relating to division of labour. What, however, characterises him as the political
-economist par excellence of the period of Manufacture, is the stress he lays on division of labour. The
-subordinate part which he assigns to machinery gave occasion in the early days of modern mechanical
-industry to the polemic of Lauderdale, and, at a later period, to that of Ure. A. Smith also confounds
-differentiation of the instruments of labour, in which the detail labourers themselves took an active
-part, with the invention of machinery; in this latter, it is not the workmen in manufactories, but learned
-men, handicraftsman, and even peasants (Brindley), who play a part.
-20 “The master manufacturer, by dividing the work to be executed into different processes, each
-requiring different degrees of skill or of force, can purchase exactly that precise quantity of both
-which is necessary for each process; whereas, if the whole work were executed by one workman, that
-person must possess sufficient skill to perform the most difficult, and sufficient strength to execute the
-most laborious of the operations into which the article is divided.” (Ch. Babbage, l.c., ch. xix.)
-21 For instance, abnormal development of some muscles, curvature of bones, &c.
-22 The question put by one of the Inquiry Commissioners, How the young persons are kept steadily to
-their work, is very correctly answered by Mr. Wm. Marshall, the general manager of a glass
-manufactory: “They cannot well neglect their work; when they once begin, they must go on; they are
-just the same as parts of a machine.” (“Children’s Empl. Comm.,” 4th Rep., 1865, p. 247.)
-23 Dr. Ure, in his apotheosis of Modern Mechanical Industry, brings out the peculiar character of
-manufacture more sharply than previous economists, who had not his polemical interest in the matter,
-and more sharply even than his contemporaries Babbage, e.g., who, though much his superior as a
-mathematician and mechanician, treated mechanical industry from the standpoint of manufacture
-alone. Ure says, “This appropriation ... to each, a workman of appropriate value and cost was naturally
-assigned, forms the very essence of division of labour.” On the other hand, he describes this division
-as “adaptation of labour to the different talents of men,” and lastly, characterises the whole
-manufacturing system as “a system for the division or gradation of labour,” as “the division of labour
-into degrees of skill,” &c. (Ure, l.c., pp. 19-23 passim.)
-255 Chapter 14
-24 “Each handicraftsman being ... enabled to perfect himself by practice in one point, became ... a
-cheaper workman.” (Ure, l.c., p. 19.)
-25 “Division of labour proceeds from the separation of professions the most widely different to that
-division, where several labourers divide between them the preparation of one and the same product, as
-in manufacture.” (Storch: “Cours d’Econ. Pol.,” Paris Edn. t. I., p. 173.) “Nous rencontrons chez les
-peuples parvenus à un certain degré de civilisation trois genres de divisions d’industrie: la première,
-que nous nommerons générale, amène la distinction des producteurs en agriculteurs, manufacturiers et
-commerçants, elle se rapporte aux trois principales branches d’industrie nationale; la seconde qu’on
-pourrait appeler spéciale, est la division de chaque genre d’industrie en espèces ... la troisième division
-d’industrie, celle enfin qu’on devrait qualifier de division de la besogne on de travail proprement dit,
-est celle qui s’établit dans les arts et les métiers séparés ... qui s’établit dans la plupart des
-manufactures et des ateliers.” [Among peoples which have reached a certain level of civilisation, we
-meet with three kinds of division of labour: the first, which we shall call general, brings about the
-division of the producers into agriculturalists, manufacturers, and traders, it corresponds to the three
-main branches of the nation’s labour; the second, which one could call particular, is the division of
-labour of each branch into species. ... The third division of labour, which one could designate as a
-division of tasks, or of labour properly so called, is that which grows up in the individual crafts and
-trades ... which is established in the majority of the manufactories and workshops] (Skarbek, l.c., pp.
-84, 85.)
-26 Note to the third edition. Subsequent very searching study of the primitive condition of man, led the
-author to the conclusion, that it was not the family that originally developed into the tribe, but that, on
-the contrary, the tribe was the primitive and spontaneously developed form of human association, on
-the basis of blood relationship, and that out of the first incipient loosening of the tribal bonds, the
-many and various forms of the family were afterwards developed. [F. E.]
-27 Sir James Steuart is the economist who has handled this subject best. How little his book, which
-appeared ten years before the “Wealth of Nations,” is known, even at the present time, may be judged
-from the fact that the admirers of Malthus do not even know that the first edition of the latter’s work
-on population contains, except in the purely declamatory part, very little but extracts from Steuart, and
-in a less degree, from Wallace and Townsend.
-28 “There is a certain density of population which is convenient, both for social intercourse, and for
-that combination of powers by which the produce of labour is increased.” (James Mill, l.c., p. 50.) “As
-the number of labourers increases, the productive power of society augments in the compound ratio of
-that increase, multiplied by the effects of the division of labour.” (Th. Hodgskin, l.c., pp. 125, 126.)
-29 In consequence of the great demand for cotton after 1861, the production of cotton, in some thickly
-populated districts of India, was extended at the expense of rice cultivation. In consequence there
-arose local famines, the defective means of communication not permitting the failure of rice in one
-district to be compensated by importation from another.
-30 Thus the fabrication of shuttles formed as early as the 17th century, a special branch of industry in
-Holland.
-31 Whether the woollen manufacture of England is not divided into several parts or branches
-appropriated to particular places, where they are only or principally manufactured; fine cloths in
-Somersetshire, coarse in Yorkshire, long ells at Exeter, soies at Sudbury, crapes at Norwich, linseys at
-Kendal, blankets at Whitney, and so forth.” (Berkeley: “The Querist,” 1751, § 520.)
-32 A. Ferguson: “History of Civil Society.” Edinburgh, 1767; Part iv, sect. ii., p. 285.
-33 In manufacture proper, he says, the division of labour appears to be greater, because “those
-employed in every different branch of the work can often be collected into the same workhouse, and
-placed at once under the view of the spectator. In those great manufactures, (!) on the contrary, which
-256 Chapter 14
-are destined to supply the great wants of the great body of the people, every different branch of the
-work employs so great a number of workmen, that it is impossible to collect them all into the same
-workhouse ... the division is not near so obvious.” (A. Smith: “Wealth of Nations,” bk. i, ch. i.) The
-celebrated passage in the same chapter that begins with the words, “Observe the accommodation of
-the most common artificer or day-labourer in a civilised and thriving country,” &c., and then proceeds
-to depict what an enormous number and variety of industries contribute to the satisfaction of the wants
-of an ordinary labourer, is copied almost word for word from B. de Mandeville’s Remarks to his
-“Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices, Publick Benefits.” (First ed., without the remarks, 1706; with the
-remarks, 1714.)
-34 “There is no longer anything which we can call the natural reward of individual labour. Each
-labourer produces only some part of a whole, and each part, having no value or utility in itself, there is
-nothing on which the labourer can seize, and say: It is my product, this I will keep to myself.”
-(“Labour Defended against the Claims of Capital.” Lond., 1825, p. 25.) The author of this admirable
-work is the Th. Hodgskin I have already cited.
-35 This distinction between division of labour in society and in manufacture, was practically illustrated
-to the Yankees. One of the new taxes devised at Washington during the civil war, was the duty of 6%
-“on all industrial products.” Question: What is an industrial product? Answer of the legislature: A
-thing is produced “when it is made,” and it is made when it is ready for sale. Now, for one example
-out of many. The New York and Philadelphia manufacturers had previously been in the habit of
-“making” umbrellas with all their belongings. But since an umbrella is a mixtum compositum of very
-heterogeneous parts, by degrees these parts became the products of various separate industries, carried
-on independently in different places. They entered as separate commodities into the umbrella
-manufactory, where they were fitted together. The Yankees have given to articles thus fitted together,
-the name of “assembled articles,” a name they deserve, for being an assemblage of taxes. Thus the
-umbrella “assembles,” first, 6% on the price of each of its elements, and a further 6% on its own total
-price.
-36 “On peut... établir en règle générale, que moins l’autorité préside à la division du travail dans
-l’intérieur de la société, plus la division du travail se développe dans l’intérieur de l’atelier, et plus elle
-y est soumise à l’autorité d’un seul. Ainsi l’autorité dans l’atelier et celle dans la société, par rapport à
-la division du travail, sont en raison inverse l’une de l’autre.” [It can ... be laid down as a general rule
-that the less authority presides over the division of labour inside society, the more the division of
-labour develops inside the workshop, and the more it is subjected there to the authority of a single
-person. Thus authority in the workshop and authority in society in relation to the division of labour,
-are in inverse ratio to each other] (Karl Marx, “Misère,” &c., pp. 130-131.)
-37 Lieut.-Col. Mark Wilks: “Historical Sketches of the South of India.” Lond., 1810-17, v. I., pp. 118-
-20. A good description of the various forms of the Indian communities is to be found in George
-Campbell’s “Modern India.” Lond., 1852.
-38 “Under this simple form ... the inhabitants of the country have lived from time immemorial. The
-boundaries of the villages have been but seldom altered; and though the villages themselves have been
-sometimes injured, and even desolated by war, famine, and disease, the same name, the same limits,
-the same interests, and even the same families, have continued for ages. The inhabitants give
-themselves no trouble about the breaking up and division of kingdoms; while the village remains
-entire, they care not to what power it is transferred, or to what sovereign it devolves; its internal
-economy remains unchanged.” (Th. Stamford Raffles, late Lieut. Gov. of Java: “The History of Java.”
-Lond., 1817, Vol. I., p. 285.)
-39 “It is not sufficient that the capital” (the writer should have said the necessary means of subsistence
-and of production) “required for the subdivision of handicrafts should be in readiness in the society: it
-must also be accumulated in the hands of the employers in sufficiently large quantities to enable them
-257 Chapter 14
-to conduct their operations on a large scale.... The more the division increases, the more does the
-constant employment of a given number of labourers require a greater outlay of capital in tools, raw
-material, &c.” (Storch: “Cours d’Econ. Polit.” Paris Ed., t. I., pp. 250, 251.) “La concentration des
-instruments de production et la division du travail sont aussi inséparables l’une de l’autre que le sont,
-dans le régime politique, la concentration des pouvoirs publics et la division des intérêts privés.” [The
-concentration of the instruments of production and the division of labour are as inseparable one from
-the other, as are, in the political sphere, the concentration of public powers and the division of private
-interests.] (Karl Marx, l.c., p. 134.)
-40 Dugald Stewart calls manufacturing labourers “living automatons ... employed in the details of the
-work.” (I. c., p. 318.)
-41 In corals, each individual is, in fact, the stomach of the whole group; but it supplies the group with
-nourishment, instead of, like the Roman patrician, withdrawing it.
-42 “L’ouvrier qui porte dans ses bras tout un métier, peut aller partout exercer son industrie et trouver
-des moyens de subsister: l’autre (the manufacturing labourer) n’est qu’un accessoire qui, séparé de ses
-confrères, n’a plus ni capacité, ni indépendance, et qui se trouve force d’accepter la loi qu’on juge à
-propos de lui imposer.” [The worker who is the master of a whole craft can work and find the means
-of subsistence anywhere; the other (the manufacturing labourer) is only an appendage who, when he is
-separated from his fellows, possesses neither capability nor independence, and finds himself forced to
-accept any law it is thought fit to impose] (Storch, l.c., Petersb. edit., 1815, t. I., p. 204.)
-43 A. Ferguson, l.c., p. 281: “The former may have gained what the other has lost.”
-44 “The man of knowledge and the productive labourer come to be widely divided from each other,
-and knowledge, instead of remaining the handmaid of labour in the hand of the labourer to increase
-his productive powers ... has almost everywhere arrayed itself against labour ... systematically
-deluding and leading them (the labourers) astray in order to render their muscular powers entirely
-mechanical and obedient.” (W. Thompson: “An Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of
-Wealth.” London, 1824, p. 274.)
-45 A. Ferguson, l.c., p. 280.
-46 J. D. Tuckett: “A History of the Past and Present State of the Labouring Population.” Lond., 1846.
-47 A. Smith: “Wealth of Nations,” Bk. v., ch. i, art. ii. Being a pupil of A. Ferguson who showed the
-disadvantageous effects of division of labour, Adam Smith was perfectly clear on this point. In the
-introduction to his work, where he ex professo praises division of labour, he indicates only in a
-cursory manner that it is the source of social inequalities. It is not till the 5th Book, on the Revenue of
-the State, that he reproduces Ferguson. In my “Misère de la Philosophie,” I have sufficiently explained
-the historical connexion between Ferguson, A. Smith, Lemontey, and Say, as regards their criticisms
-of Division of Labour, and have shown, for the first time, that Division of Labour as practised in
-manufactures, is a specific form of the capitalist mode of production.
-48 Ferguson had already said, l.c., p. 281: “And thinking itself, in this age of separations, may become
-a peculiar craft.”
-49 G. Garnier, vol. V. of his translation of A. Smith, pp. 4-5.
-50 Ramazzini, professor of practical medicine at Padua, published in 1713 his work “De morbis
-artificum,” which was translated into French 1781, reprinted 1841 in the “Encyclopédie des Sciences
-Médicales. 7me Dis. Auteurs Classiques.” The period of Modern Mechanical Industry has, of course,
-very much enlarged his catalogue of labour’s diseases. See “Hygiène physique et morale de l’ouvrier
-dans les grandes villes en général et dans la ville de Lyon en particulier. Par le Dr. A. L. Fonteret,
-Paris, 1858,” and “Die Krankheiten, welche verschiednen Ständen, Altern und Geschlechtern
-eigenthümlich sind. 6 Vols. Ulm, 1860,” and others. In 1854 the Society of Arts appointed a
-258 Chapter 14
-Commission of Inquiry into industrial pathology. The list of documents collected by this commission
-is to be seen in the catalogue of the “Twickenham Economic Museum.” Very important are the
-official “Reports on Public Health.” See also Eduard Reich, M. D. “Ueber die Entartung des
-Menschen,” Erlangen, 1868.
-51 (D. Urquhart: “Familiar Words.” Lond., 1855, p. 119.) Hegel held very heretical views on division
-of labour. In his “Rechtsphilosophie” he says: “By well educated men we understand in the first
-instance, those who can do everything that others do.”
-52 The simple belief in the inventive genius exercised a priori by the individual capitalist in division of
-labour, exists now-a-days only among German professors, of the stamp of Herr Roscher, who, to
-recompense the capitalist from whose Jovian head division of labour sprang ready formed, dedicates
-to him “various wages” (diverse Arbeitslöhne). The more or less extensive application of division of
-labour depends on length of purse, not on greatness of genius.
-53 The older writers, like Petty and the anonymous author of “Advantages of the East India Trade,”
-bring out the capitalist character of division of labour as applied in manufacture more than A. Smith
-does.
-54 Amongst the moderns may be excepted a few writers of the 18th century, like Beccaria and James
-Harris, who with regard to division of labour almost entirely follow the ancients. Thus, Beccaria:
-“Ciascuno prova coll’esperienza, che applicando la mano e l’ingegno sempre allo stesso genere di
-opere e di produtte, egli più facili, più abbondanti e migliori ne traca risultati, di quello che se
-ciascuno isolatamente le cose tutte a se necessarie soltanto facesse.... Dividendosi in tal maniera per la
-comune e privata utilità gli uomini in varie classi e condizioni.” [Everyone knows from experience
-that if the hands and the intelligence are always applied to the same kind of work and the same
-products, these will be produced more easily, in greater abundance, and in higher quality, than if each
-individual makes for himself all the things he needs ... In this way, men are divided up into various
-classes and conditions, to their own advantage and to that of the commodity.](Cesare Beccaria:
-“Elementi di Econ: Pubblica,” ed. Custodi, Parte Moderna, t. xi, p. 29.) James Harris, afterwards Earl
-of Malmesbury, celebrated for the “Diaries” of his embassy at St. Petersburg, says in a note to his
-“Dialogue Concerning Happiness,” Lond., 1741, reprinted afterwards in “Three Treatises, 3 Ed.,
-Lond., 1772: “The whole argument to prove society natural (i.e., by division of employments) ... is
-taken from the second book of Plato’s Republic.”
-55 Thus, in the Odyssey xiv., 228, [“Αλλος γαρ ταλλοισιν ανερ επιτερπεται εργοις” For
-different men take joy in different works] and Archilochus in Sextus Empiricus, [“αλλος
-αλλω επ εργο καρδιην ιαινεται.” men differ as to things cheer their hearts]
-56 [“Πολλ ηπισταιο εργα, χαχως δ ηπιστανο παντα.” He could do many works, but all of
-them badly – Homer] Every Athenian considered himself superior as a producer of commodities
-to a Spartan; for the latter in time of war had men enough at his disposal but could not command
-money, as Thucydides makes Pericles say in the speech inciting the Athenians to the
-Peloponnesian war: [“σωμασι τε ετοιμοτεροι οι αυτονργοι τωναντηρωπων η χρημασι
-πολεμειν” people producing for their own consumption will rather let war have their bodies than
-their money] (Thuc.: 1, I. c. 41.) Nevertheless, even with regard to material production, [autarceia
-self-sufficiency], as opposed to division of labour remained their ideal, [“παρων γαρ το, ευ,
-παρα τουτων χαι το αυταρεσς.” For with the latter there is well-being, but with the former
-there is independence.] It should be mentioned here that at the date of the fall of the 30 Tyrants
-there were still not 5,000 Athenians without landed property.
-57 With Plato, division of labour within the community is a development from the multifarious
-requirements, and the limited capacities of individuals. The main point with him is, that the
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-labourer must adapt himself to the work, not the work to the labourer; which latter is unavoidable,
-if he carries on several trades at once, thus making one or the other of them subordinate.
-[“Ου γαρ ετηελει το πραττομενον τεν του πραττονιος σχηολεν περιμενειν, αλλ αναγκε το
-ν πραττοντα το πραττομενο επακολοοτηειν με εν παρεργου μερει. Αναγκε. Εκ δε τουτον
-πλειο τε εκαστα γιγνεται και καλλιον και ραον, οταν εις εν καια πηψσιν και εν καιρο σχ
-ηολεν τον αλλον αγον, πραττε.”] [For the workman must wait upon the work; it will not wait
-upon his leisure and allow itself to be done in a spare moment. — Yes, he must,— So the
-conclusion is that more will be produced of every thing and the work will be more easily and
-better done, when every man is set free from all other occupations to do, at the right time, the one
-thing for which he is naturally fitted.] (Rep. 1. 2. Ed. Baiter, Orelli, &c.) So in Thucydides, l.c., c.
-142: “Seafaring is an art like any other, and cannot, as circumstances require, be carried on as a
-subsidiary occupation; nay, other subsidiary occupations cannot be carried on alongside of this
-one.” If the work, says Plato, has to wait for the labourer, the critical point in the process is
-missed and the article spoiled, “εργου χαιρον διολλυται.” [If someone lets slip ...] The same
-Platonic idea is found recurring in the protest of the English bleachers against the clause in the
-Factory Act that provides fixed mealtimes for all operatives. Their business cannot wait the
-convenience of the workmen, for “in the various operations of singeing, washing, bleaching,
-mangling, calendering, and dyeing, none of them can be stopped at a given moment without risk
-of damage ... to enforce the same dinner hour for all the workpeople might occasionally subject
-valuable goods to the risk of danger by incomplete operations.” Le platonisme où va-t-il se
-nicher! [Where will Platonism be found next!]
-58 Xenophon says, it is not only an honour to receive food from the table of the King of Persia, but
-such food is much more tasty than other food. “And there is nothing wonderful in this, for as the other
-arts are brought to special perfection in the great towns, so the royal food is prepared in a special way.
-For in the small towns the same man makes bedsteads, doors, ploughs, and tables: often, too, he builds
-houses into the bargain, and is quite content if he finds custom sufficient for his sustenance. It is
-altogether impossible for a man who does so many things to do them all well. But in the great towns,
-where each can find many buyers, one trade is sufficient to maintain the man who carries it on. Nay,
-there is often not even need of one complete trade, but one man makes shoes for men, another for
-women. Here and there one man gets a living by sewing, another by cutting out shoes; one does
-nothing but cut out clothes, another nothing but sew the pieces together. It follows necessarily then,
-that he who does the simplest kind of work, undoubtedly does it better than anyone else. So it is with
-the art of cooking.” (Xen. Cyrop. I. viii., c. 2.) Xenophon here lays stress exclusively upon the
-excellence to be attained in use-value, although he well knows that the gradations of the division of
-labour depend on the extent of the market.
-59 He (Busiris) divided them all into special castes ... commanded that the same individuals should
-always carry on the same trade, for he knew that they who change their occupations become skilled in
-none; but that those who constantly stick to one occupation bring it to the highest perfection. In truth,
-we shall also find that in relation to the arts and handicrafts, they have outstripped their rivals more
-than a master does a bungler; and the contrivances for maintaining the monarchy and the other
-institutions of their State are so admirable that the most celebrated philosophers who treat of this
-subject praise the constitution of the Egyptian State above all others. (Isocrates, Busiris, c. 8.)
-60 Cf. Diodorus Siculus.
-61 Ure, l.c., p. 20.
-62 This is more the case in England than in France, and more in France than in Holland.
-Chapter 15: Machinery and Modern Industry
-Section 1 : The Development of Machinery
-John Stuart Mill says in his “Principles of Political Economy":
-“It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the
-day’s toil of any human being.” 1
-That is, however, by no means the aim of the capitalistic application of machinery. Like every
-other increase in the productiveness of labour, machinery is intended to cheapen commodities,
-and, by shortening that portion of the working day, in which the labourer works for himself, to
-lengthen the other portion that he gives, without an equivalent, to the capitalist. In short, it is a
-means for producing surplus-value.
-In manufacture, the revolution in the mode of production begins with the labour-power, in
-modern industry it begins with the instruments of labour. Our first inquiry then is, how the
-instruments of labour are converted from tools into machines, or what is the difference between a
-machine and the implements of a handicraft? We are only concerned here with striking and
-general characteristics; for epochs in the history of society are no more separated from each other
-by hard and fast lines of demarcation, than are geological epochs.
-Mathematicians and mechanicians, and in this they are followed by a few English economists,
-call a tool a simple machine, and a machine a complex tool. They see no essential difference
-between them, and even give the name of machine to the simple mechanical powers, the lever,
-the inclined plane, the screw, the wedge, &c.2 As a matter of fact, every machine is a combination
-of those simple powers, no matter how they may be disguised. From the economic standpoint this
-explanation is worth nothing, because the historical element is wanting. Another explanation of
-the difference between tool and machine is that in the case of a tool, man is the motive power,
-while the motive power of a machine is something different from man, as, for instance, an animal,
-water, wind, and so on.3 According to this, a plough drawn by oxen, which is a contrivance
-common to the most different epochs, would be a machine, while Claussen’s circular loom,
-which, worked by a single labourer, weaves 96,000 picks per minute, would be a mere tool. Nay,
-this very loom, though a tool when worked by hand, would, if worked by steam, be a machine.
-And since the application of animal power is one of man’s earliest inventions, production by
-machinery would have preceded production by handicrafts. When in 1735, John Wyatt brought
-out his spinning machine, and began the industrial revolution of the 18th century, not a word did
-he say about an ass driving it instead of a man, and yet this part fell to the ass. He described it as a
-machine “to spin without fingers.”4
-All fully developed machinery consists of three essentially different parts, the motor mechanism,
-the transmitting mechanism, and finally the tool or working machine. The motor mechanism is
-that which puts the whole in motion. It either generates its own motive power, like the steam-
-engine, the caloric engine, the electromagnetic machine, &c., or it receives its impulse from some
-already existing natural force, like the water-wheel from a head of water, the wind-mill from
-wind, &c. The transmitting mechanism, composed of fly-wheels, shafting, toothed wheels,
-pullies, straps, ropes, bands, pinions, and gearing of the most varied kinds, regulates the motion,
-changes its form where necessary, as for instance, from linear to circular, and divides and
-distributes it among the working machines. These two first parts of the whole mechanism are
-there, solely for putting the working machines in motion, by means of which motion the subject
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-of labour is seized upon and modified as desired. The tool or working machine is that part of the
-machinery with which the industrial revolution of the 18th century started. And to this day it
-constantly serves as such a starting-point, whenever a handicraft, or a manufacture, is turned into
-an industry carried on by machinery.
-On a closer examination of the working machine proper, we find in it, as a general rule, though
-often, no doubt, under very altered forms, the apparatus and tools used by the handicraftsman or
-manufacturing workman; with this difference, that instead of being human implements, they are
-the implements of a mechanism, or mechanical implements. Either the entire machine is only a
-more or less altered mechanical edition of the old handicraft tool, as, for instance, the power-
-loom,5 or the working parts fitted in the frame of the machine are old acquaintances, as spindles
-are in a mule, needles in a stocking-loom, saws in a sawing-machine, and knives in a chopping
-machine. The distinction between these tools and the body proper of the machine, exists from
-their very birth; for they continue for the most part to be produced by handicraft, or by
-manufacture, and are afterwards fitted into the body of the machine, which is the product of
-machinery.6 The machine proper is therefore a mechanism that, after being set in motion,
-performs with its tools the same operations that were formerly done by the workman with similar
-tools. Whether the motive power is derived from man, or from some other machine, makes no
-difference in this respect. From the moment that the tool proper is taken from man, and fitted into
-a mechanism, a machine takes the place of a mere implement. The difference strikes one at once,
-even in those cases where man himself continues to be the prime mover. The number of
-implements that he himself can use simultaneously, is limited by the number of his own natural
-instruments of production, by the number of his bodily organs. In Germany, they tried at first to
-make one spinner work two spinning-wheels, that is, to work simultaneously with both hands and
-both feet. This was too difficult. Later, a treddle spinning-wheel with two spindles was invented,
-but adepts in spinning, who could spin two threads at once, were almost as scarce as two-headed
-men. The Jenny, on the other hand, even at its very birth, spun with 12-18 spindles, and the
-stocking-loom knits with many thousand needles at once. The number of tools that a machine can
-bring into play simultaneously, is from the very first emancipated from the organic limits that
-hedge in the tools of a handicraftsman.
-In many manual implements the distinction between man as mere motive power, and man as the
-workman or operator properly so called, is brought into striking contrast. For instance, the foot is
-merely the prime mover of the spinning-wheel, while the hand, working with the spindle, and
-drawing and twisting, performs the real operation of spinning. It is this last part of the
-handicraftsman’s implement that is first seized upon by the industrial revolution, leaving to the
-workman, in addition to his new labour of watching the machine with his eyes and correcting its
-mistakes with his hands, the merely mechanical part of being the moving power. On the other
-hand, implements, in regard to which man has always acted as a simple motive power, as, for
-instance, by turning the crank of a mill,7 by pumping, by moving up and down the arm of a
-bellows, by pounding with a mortar, &c., such implements soon call for the application of
-animals, water8 and wind as motive powers. Here and there, long before the period of
-manufacture, and also, to some extent, during that period, these implements pass over into
-machines, but without creating any revolution in the mode of production. It becomes evident, in
-the period of modern industry, that these implements, even under their form of manual tools, are
-already machines. For instance, the pumps with which the Dutch, in 1836-7, emptied the Lake of
-Harlem, were constructed on the principle of ordinary pumps; the only difference being, that their
-pistons were driven by cyclopean steam-engines, instead of by men. The common and very
-imperfect bellows of the blacksmith is, in England, occasionally converted into a blowing-engine,
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-by connecting its arm with a steam-engine. The steam-engine itself, such as it was at its
-invention, during the manufacturing period at the close of the 17th century, and such as it
-continued to be down to 1780,9 did not give rise to any industrial revolution. It was, on the
-contrary, the invention of machines that made a revolution in the form of steam-engines
-necessary. As soon as man, instead of working with an implement on the subject of his labour,
-becomes merely the motive power of an implement-machine, it is a mere accident that motive
-power takes the disguise of human muscle; and it may equally well take the form of wind, water
-or steam. Of course, this does not prevent such a change of form from producing great technical
-alterations in the mechanism that was originally constructed to be driven by man alone. Now-a-
-days, all machines that have their way to make, such as sewing-machines, bread-making
-machines, &c., are, unless from their very nature their use on a small scale is excluded,
-constructed to be driven both by human and by purely mechanical motive power.
-The machine, which is the starting-point of the industrial revolution, supersedes the workman,
-who handles a single tool, by a mechanism operating with a number of similar tools, and set in
-motion by a single motive power, whatever the form of that power may be.10 Here we have the
-machine, but only as an elementary factor of production by machinery.
-Increase in the size of the machine, and in the number of its working tools, calls for a more
-massive mechanism to drive it; and this mechanism requires, in order to overcome its resistance,
-a mightier moving power than that of man, apart from the fact that man is a very imperfect
-instrument for producing uniform continued motion. But assuming that he is acting simply as a
-motor, that a machine has taken the place of his tool, it is evident that he can be replaced by
-natural forces. Of all the great motors handed down from the manufacturing period, horse-power
-is the worst, partly because a horse has a head of his own, partly because he is costly, and the
-extent to which he is applicable in factories is very restricted.11 Nevertheless the horse was
-extensively used during the infancy of modern industry. This is proved, as well by the complaints
-of contemporary agriculturists, as by the term “horse-power,” which has survived to this day as
-an expression for mechanical force.
-Wind was too inconstant and uncontrollable, and besides, in England, the birthplace of modern
-industry, the use of water power preponderated even during the manufacturing period. In the 17th
-century attempts had already been made to turn two pairs of millstones with a single water-wheel.
-But the increased size of the gearing was too much for the water power, which had now become
-insufficient, and this was one of the circumstances that led to a more accurate investigation of the
-laws of friction. In the same way the irregularity caused by the motive power in mills that were
-put in motion by pushing and pulling a lever, led to the theory, and the application, of the fly-
-wheel, which afterwards plays so important a part in modern industry.12 In this way, during the
-manufacturing period, were developed the first scientific and technical elements of Modern
-Mechanical Industry. Arkwright’s throstle spinning mill was from the very first turned by water.
-But for all that, the use of water, as the predominant motive power, was beset with difficulties. It
-could not be increased at will, it failed at certain seasons of the year, and, above all, it was
-essentially local.13 Not till the invention of Watt’s second and so-called double-acting steam-
-engine, was a prime mover found, that begot its own force by the consumption of coal and water,
-whose power was entirely under man’s control, that was mobile and a means of locomotion, that
-was urban and not, like the waterwheel, rural, that permitted production to be concentrated in
-towns instead of, like the water-wheels, being scattered up and down the country,14 that was of
-universal technical application, and, relatively speaking, little affected in its choice of residence
-by local circumstances. The greatness of Watt’s genius showed itself in the specification of the
-patent that he took out in April, 1784. In that specification his steam-engine is described, not as
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-an invention for a specific purpose, but as an agent universally applicable in Mechanical Industry.
-In it he points out applications, many of which, as for instance, the steam-hammer, were not
-introduced till half a century later. Nevertheless he doubted the use of steam-engines in
-navigation. His successors, Boulton and Watt, sent to the exhibition of 1851 steam-engines of
-colossal size for ocean steamers.
-As soon as tools had been converted from being manual implements of man into implements of a
-mechanical apparatus, of a machine, the motive mechanism also acquired an independent form,
-entirely emancipated from the restraints of human strength. Thereupon the individual machine,
-that we have hitherto been considering, sinks into a mere factor in production by machinery. One
-motive mechanism was now able to drive many machines at once. The motive mechanism grows
-with the number of the machines that are turned simultaneously, and the transmitting mechanism
-becomes a wide-spreading apparatus.
-We now proceed to distinguish the co-operation of a number of machines of one kind from a
-complex system of machinery.
-In the one case, the product is entirely made by a single machine, which performs all the various
-operations previously done by one handicraftsman with his tool; as, for instance, by a weaver
-with his loom; or by several handicraftsman successively, either separately or as members of a
-system of Manufacture.15 For example, in the manufacture of envelopes, one man folded the
-paper with the folder, another laid on the gum, a third turned the flap over, on which the device is
-impressed, a fourth embossed the device, and so on; and for each of these operations the envelope
-had to change hands. One single envelope machine now performs all these operations at once,
-and makes more than 3,000 envelopes in an hour. In the London exhibition of 1862, there was an
-American machine for making paper cornets. It cut the paper, pasted, folded, and finished 300 in
-a minute. Here, the whole process, which, when carried on as Manufacture, was split up into, and
-carried out by, a series of operations, is completed by a single machine, working a combination of
-various tools. Now, whether such a machine be merely a reproduction of a complicated manual
-implement, or a combination of various simple implements specialised by Manufacture, in either
-case, in the factory, i.e., in the workshop in which machinery alone is used, we meet again with
-simple co-operation; and, leaving the workman out of consideration for the moment, this co-
-operation presents itself to us, in the first instance, as the conglomeration in one place of similar
-and simultaneously acting machines. Thus, a weaving factory is constituted of a number of
-power-looms, working side by side, and a sewing factory of a number of sewing-machines all in
-the same building. But there is here a technical oneness in the whole system, owing to all the
-machines receiving their impulse simultaneously, and in an equal degree, from the pulsations of
-the common prime mover, by the intermediary of the transmitting mechanism; and this
-mechanism, to a certain extent, is also common to them all, since only particular ramifications of
-it branch off to each machine. Just as a number of tools, then, form the organs of a machine, so a
-number of machines of one kind constitute the organs of the motive mechanism.
-A real machinery system, however, does not take the place of these independent machines, until
-the subject of labour goes through a connected series of detail processes, that are carried out by a
-chain of machines of various kinds, the one supplementing the other. Here we have again the co-
-operation by division of labour that characterises Manufacture; only now, it is a combination of
-detail machines. The special tools of the various detail workmen, such as those of the beaters,
-cambers, spinners, &c., in the woollen manufacture, are now transformed into the tools of
-specialised machines, each machine constituting a special organ, with a special function, in the
-system. In those branches of industry in which the machinery system is first introduced,
-Manufacture itself furnishes, in a general way, the natural basis for the division, and consequent
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-organisation, of the process of production.16 Nevertheless an essential difference at once
-manifests itself. In Manufacture it is the workmen who, with their manual implements, must,
-either singly or in groups, carry on each particular detail process. If, on the one hand, the
-workman becomes adapted to the process, on the other, the process was previously made suitable
-to the workman. This subjective principle of the division of labour no longer exists in production
-by machinery. Here, the process as a whole is examined objectively, in itself, that is to say,
-without regard to the question of its execution by human hands, it is analysed into its constituent
-phases; and the problem, how to execute each detail process, and bind them all into a whole, is
-solved by the aid of machines, chemistry, &c.17 But, of course, in this case also, theory must be
-perfected by accumulated experience on a large scale. Each detail machine supplies raw material
-to the machine next in order; and since they are all working at the same time, the product is
-always going through the various stages of its fabrication, and is also constantly in a state of
-transition, from one phase to another. Just as in Manufacture, the direct co-operation of the detail
-labourers establishes a numerical proportion between the special groups, so in an organised
-system of machinery, where one detail machine is constantly kept employed by another, a fixed
-relation is established between their numbers, their size, and their speed. The collective machine,
-now an organised system of various kinds of single machines, and of groups of single machines,
-becomes more and more perfect, the more the process as a whole becomes a continuous one, i.e.,
-the less the raw material is interrupted in its passage from its first phase to its last; in other words,
-the more its passage from one phase to another is effected, not by the hand of man, but by the
-machinery itself. In Manufacture the isolation of each detail process is a condition imposed by the
-nature of division of labour, but in the fully developed factory the continuity of those processes is,
-on the contrary, imperative.
-A system of machinery, whether it reposes on the mere co-operation of similar machines, as in
-weaving, or on a combination of different machines, as in spinning, constitutes in itself a huge
-automaton, whenever it is driven by a self-acting prime mover. But although the factory as a
-whole be driven by its steam-engine, yet either some of the individual machines may require the
-aid of the workman for some of their movements (such aid was necessary for the running in of the
-mule carriage, before the invention of the self-acting mule, and is still necessary in fine-spinning
-mills); or, to enable a machine to do its work, certain parts of it may require to be handled by the
-workman like a manual tool; this was the case in machine-makers’ workshops, before the
-conversion of the slide rest into a self-actor. As soon as a machine executes, without man’s help,
-all the movements requisite to elaborate the raw material, needing only attendance from him, we
-have an automatic system of machinery, and one that is susceptible of constant improvement in
-its details. Such improvements as the apparatus that stops a drawing frame, whenever a sliver
-breaks, and the self-acting stop, that stops the power-loom so soon as the shuttle bobbin is
-emptied of weft, are quite modern inventions. As an example, both of continuity of production,
-and of the carrying out of the automatic principle, we may take a modern paper mill. In the paper
-industry generally, we may advantageously study in detail not only the distinctions between
-modes of production based on different means of production, but also the connexion of the social
-conditions of production with those modes: for the old German paper-making furnishes us with a
-sample of handicraft production; that of Holland in the 17th and of France in the 18th century
-with a sample of manufacturing in the strict sense; and that of modern England with a sample of
-automatic fabrication of this article. Besides these, there still exist, in India and China, two
-distinct antique Asiatic forms of the same industry.
-An organised system of machines, to which motion is communicated by the transmitting
-mechanism from a central automaton, is the most developed form of production by machinery.
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-Here we have, in the place of the isolated machine, a mechanical monster whose body fills whole
-factories, and whose demon power, at first veiled under the slow and measured motions of his
-giant limbs, at length breaks out into the fast and furious whirl of his countless working organs.
-There were mules and steam-engines before there were any labourers, whose exclusive
-occupation it was to make mules and steam-engines; just as men wore clothes before there were
-such people as tailors. The inventions of Vaucanson, Arkwright, Watt, and others, were, however,
-practicable, only because those inventors found, ready to hand, a considerable number of skilled
-mechanical workmen, placed at their disposal by the manufacturing period. Some of these
-workmen were independent handicraftsman of various trades, others were grouped together in
-manufactures, in which, as before-mentioned, division of labour was strictly carried out. As
-inventions increased in number, and the demand for the newly discovered machines grew larger,
-the machine-making industry split up, more and more, into numerous independent branches, and
-division of labour in these manufactures was more and more developed. Here, then, we see in
-Manufacture the immediate technical foundation of modern industry. Manufacture produced the
-machinery, by means of which modern industry abolished the handicraft and manufacturing
-systems in those spheres of production that it first seized upon. The factory system was therefore
-raised, in the natural course of things, on an inadequate foundation. When the system attained to a
-certain degree of development, it had to root up this ready-made foundation, which in the
-meantime had been elaborated on the old lines, and to build up for itself a basis that should
-correspond to its methods of production. Just as the individual machine retains a dwarfish
-character, so long as it is worked by the power of man alone, and just as no system of machinery
-could be properly developed before the steam-engine took the place of the earlier motive powers,
-animals, wind, and even water; so, too, modern industry was crippled in its complete
-development, so long as its characteristic instrument of production, the machine, owed its
-existence to personal strength and personal skill, and depended on the muscular development, the
-keenness of sight, and the cunning of hand, with which the detail workmen in manufactures, and
-the manual labourers in handicrafts, wielded their dwarfish implements. Thus, apart from the
-dearness of the machines made in this way, a circumstance that is ever present to the mind of the
-capitalist, the expansion of industries carried on by means of machinery, and the invasion by
-machinery of fresh branches of production, were dependent on the growth of a class of workmen,
-who, owing to the almost artistic nature of their employment, could increase their numbers only
-gradually, and not by leaps and bounds. But besides this, at a certain stage of its development,
-modern industry became technologically incompatible with the basis furnished for it by
-handicraft and Manufacture. The increasing size of the prime movers, of the transmitting
-mechanism, and of the machines proper, the greater complication, multiformity and regularity of
-the details of these machines, as they more and more departed from the model of those originally
-made by manual labour, and acquired a form, untrammelled except by the conditions under which
-they worked,18 the perfecting of the automatic system, and the use, every day more unavoidable,
-of a more refractory material, such as iron instead of wood ‒ the solution of all these problems,
-which sprang up by the force of circumstances, everywhere met with a stumbling-block in the
-personal restrictions, which even the collective labourer of Manufacture could not break through,
-except to a limited extent. Such machines as the modern hydraulic press, the modern power-loom,
-and the modern carding engine, could never have been furnished by Manufacture.
-A radical change in the mode of production in one sphere of industry involves a similar change in
-other spheres. This happens at first in such branches of industry as are connected together by
-being separate phases of a process, and yet are isolated by the social division of labour, in such a
-way, that each of them produces an independent commodity. Thus spinning by machinery made
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-weaving by machinery a necessity, and both together made the mechanical and chemical
-revolution that took place in bleaching, printing, and dyeing, imperative. So too, on the other
-hand, the revolution in cotton-spinning called forth the invention of the gin, for separating the
-seeds from the cotton fibre; it was only by means of this invention, that the production of cotton
-became possible on the enormous scale at present required.19 But more especially, the revolution
-in the modes of production of industry and agriculture made necessary a revolution in the general
-conditions of the social process of production, i.e., in the means of communication and of
-transport. In a society whose pivot, to use an expression of Fourier, was agriculture on a small
-scale, with its subsidiary domestic industries, and the urban handicrafts, the means of
-communication and transport were so utterly inadequate to the productive requirements of the
-manufacturing period, with its extended division of social labour, its concentration of the
-instruments of labour, and of the workmen, and its colonial markets, that they became in fact
-revolutionised. In the same way the means of communication and transport handed down from
-the manufacturing period soon became unbearable trammels on modern industry, with its feverish
-haste of production, its enormous extent, its constant flinging of capital and labour from one
-sphere of production into another, and its newly-created connexions with the markets of the
-whole world. Hence, apart from the radical changes introduced in the construction of sailing
-vessels, the means of communication and transport became gradually adapted to the modes of
-production of mechanical industry, by the creation of a system of river steamers, railways, ocean
-steamers, and telegraphs. But the huge masses of iron that had now to be forged, to be welded, to
-be cut, to be bored, and to be shaped, demanded, on their part, cyclopean machines, for the
-construction of which the methods of the manufacturing period were utterly inadequate.
-Modern Industry had therefore itself to take in hand the machine, its characteristic instrument of
-production, and to construct machines by machines. It was not till it did this, that it built up for
-itself a fitting technical foundation, and stood on its own feet. Machinery, simultaneously with the
-increasing use of it, in the first decades of this century, appropriated, by degrees, the fabrication
-of machines proper. But it was only during the decade preceding 1866, that the construction of
-railways and ocean steamers on a stupendous scale called into existence the cyclopean machines
-now employed in the construction of prime movers.
-The most essential condition to the production of machines by machines was a prime mover
-capable of exerting any amount of force, and yet under perfect control. Such a condition was
-already supplied by the steam-engine. But at the same time it was necessary to produce the
-geometrically accurate straight lines, planes, circles, cylinders, cones, and spheres, required in the
-detail parts of the machines. This problem Henry Maudsley solved in the first decade of this
-century by the invention of the slide rest, a tool that was soon made automatic, and in a modified
-form was applied to other constructive machines besides the lathe, for which it was originally
-intended. This mechanical appliance replaces, not some particular tool, but the hand itself, which
-produces a given form by holding and guiding the cutting tool along the iron or other material
-operated upon. Thus it became possible to produce the forms of the individual parts of machinery
-“with a degree of ease, accuracy, and speed, that no accumulated experience of
-the hand of the most skilled workman could give.”20
-If we now fix our attention on that portion of the machinery employed in the construction of
-machines, which constitutes the operating tool, we find the manual implements re-appearing, but
-on a cyclopean scale. The operating part of the boring machine is an immense drill driven by a
-steam-engine; without this machine, on the other hand, the cylinders of large steam-engines and
-of hydraulic presses could not be made. The mechanical lathe is only a cyclopean reproduction of
-the ordinary foot-lathe; the planing machine, an iron carpenter, that works on iron with the same
-267 Chapter 15
-tools that the human carpenter employs on wood; the instrument that, on the London wharves,
-cuts the veneers, is a gigantic razor; the tool of the shearing machine, which shears iron as easily
-as a tailor’s scissors cut cloth, is a monster pair of scissors; and the steam-hammer works with an
-ordinary hammer head, but of such a weight that not Thor himself could wield it.21 These steam-
-hammers are an invention of Nasmyth, and there is one that weighs over 6 tons and strikes with a
-vertical fall of 7 feet, on an anvil weighing 36 tons. It is mere child’s-play for it to crush a block
-of granite into powder, yet it is no less capable of driving, with a succession of light taps, a nail
-into a piece of soft wood.22
-The implements of labour, in the form of machinery, necessitate the substitution of natural forces
-for human force, and the conscious application of science, instead of rule of thumb. In
-Manufacture, the organisation of the social labour-process is purely subjective; it is a combination
-of detail labourers; in its machinery system, modern industry has a productive organism that is
-purely objective, in which the labourer becomes a mere appendage to an already existing material
-condition of production. In simple co-operation, and even in that founded on division of labour,
-the suppression of the isolated, by the collective, workman still appears to be more or less
-accidental. Machinery, with a few exceptions to be mentioned later, operates only by means of
-associated labour, or labour in common. Hence the co-operative character of the labour-process
-is, in the latter case, a technical necessity dictated by the instrument of labour itself.
-Section 2: The Value Transferred by Machinery to the Product
-We saw that the productive forces resulting from co-operation and division of labour cost capital
-nothing. They are natural forces of social labour. So also physical forces, like steam, water, &c.,
-when appropriated to productive processes, cost nothing. But just as a man requires lungs to
-breathe with, so he requires something that is work of man’s hand, in order to consume physical
-forces productively. A water-wheel is necessary to exploit the force of water, and a steam-engine
-to exploit the elasticity of steam. Once discovered, the law of the deviation of the magnetic needle
-in the field of an electric current, or the law of the magnetisation of iron, around which an electric
-current circulates, cost never a penny.23 But the exploitation of these laws for the purposes of
-telegraphy, &c., necessitates a costly and extensive apparatus. The tool, as we have seen, is not
-exterminated by the machine. From being a dwarf implement of the human organism, it expands
-and multiplies into the implement of a mechanism created by man. Capital now sets the labourer
-to work, not with a manual tool, but with a machine which itself handles the tools. Although,
-therefore, it is clear at the first glance that, by incorporating both stupendous physical forces, and
-the natural sciences, with the process of production, modern industry raises the productiveness of
-labour to an extraordinary degree, it is by no means equally clear, that this increased productive
-force is not, on the other hand, purchased by an increased expenditure of labour. Machinery, like
-every other component of constant capital, creates no new value, but yields up its own value to
-the product that it serves to beget. In so far as the machine has value, and, in consequence, parts
-with value to the product, it forms an element in the value of that product. Instead of being
-cheapened, the product is made dearer in proportion to the value of the machine. And it is clear as
-noon-day, that machines and systems of machinery, the characteristic instruments of labour of
-Modern Industry, are incomparably more loaded with value than the implements used in
-handicrafts and manufactures.
-In the first place, it must be observed that the machinery, while always entering as a whole into
-the labour-process, enters into the value-begetting process only by bits. It never adds more value
-than it loses, on an average, by wear and tear. Hence there is a great difference between the value
-of a machine, and the value transferred in a given time by that machine to the product. The longer
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-the life of the machine in the labour-process, the greater is that difference. It is true, no doubt, as
-we have already seen, that every instrument of labour enters as a whole into the labour-process,
-and only piece-meal, proportionally to its average daily loss by wear and tear, into the value-
-begetting process. But this difference between the instrument as a whole and its daily wear and
-tear, is much greater in a machine than in a tool, because the machine, being made from more
-durable material, has a longer life; because its employment, being regulated by strictly scientific
-laws, allows of greater economy in the wear and tear of its parts, and in the materials it consumes;
-and lastly, because its field of production is incomparably larger than that of a tool. After making
-allowance, both in the case of the machine and of the tool, for their average daily cost, that is for
-the value they transmit to the product by their average daily wear and tear, and for their
-consumption of auxiliary substance, such as oil, coal, and so on, they each do their work
-gratuitously, just like the forces furnished by Nature without the help of man. The greater the
-productive power of the machinery compared with that of the tool, the greater is the extent of its
-gratuitous service compared with that of the tool. In modern industry man succeeded for the first
-time in making the product of his past labour work on a large scale gratuitously, like the forces of
-Nature.24
-In treating of Co-operation and Manufacture, it was shown that certain general factors of
-production, such as buildings, are, in comparison with the scattered means of production of the
-isolated workman, economised by being consumed in common, and that they therefore make the
-product cheaper. In a system of machinery, not only is the framework of the machine consumed
-in common by its numerous operating implements, but the prime mover, together with a part of
-the transmitting mechanism, is consumed in common by the numerous operative machines.
-Given the difference between the value of the machinery, and the value transferred by it in a day
-to the product, the extent to which this latter value makes the product dearer, depends in the first
-instance, upon the size of the product; so to say, upon its area. Mr. Baynes, of Blackburn, in a
-lecture published in 1858, estimates that
-“each real mechanical horse-power25 will drive 450 self-acting mule spindles,
-with preparation, or 200 throstle spindles, or 15 looms for 40 inch cloth with the
-appliances for warping, sizing, &c.”
-In the first case, it is the day’s produce of 450 mule spindles, in the second, of 200 throstle
-spindles, in the third, of 15 power-looms, over which the daily cost of one horse-power, and the
-wear and tear of the machinery set in motion by that power, are spread; so that only a very minute
-value is transferred by such wear and tear to a pound of yarn or a yard of cloth. The same is the
-case with the steam-hammer mentioned above. Since its daily wear and tear, its coal-
-consumption, &c., are spread over the stupendous masses of iron hammered by it in a day, only a
-small value is added to a hundred weight of iron; but that value would be very great, if the
-cyclopean instrument were employed in driving in nails.
-Given a machine’s capacity for work, that is, the number of its operating tools, or, where it is a
-question of force, their mass, the amount of its product will depend on the velocity of its working
-parts, on the speed, for instance, of the spindles, or on the number of blows given by the hammer
-in a minute. Many of these colossal hammers strike seventy times in a minute, and Ryder’s patent
-machine for forging spindles with small hammers gives as many as 700 strokes per minute.
-Given the rate at which machinery transfers its value to the product, the amount of value so
-transferred depends on the total value of the machinery.26 The less labour it contains, the less
-value it imparts to the product. The less value it gives up, so much the more productive it is, and
-so much the more its services approximate to those of natural forces. But the production of
-machinery by machinery lessens its value relatively to its extension and efficacy.
-269 Chapter 15
-An analysis and comparison of the prices of commodities produced by handicrafts or
-manufactures, and of the prices of the same commodities produced by machinery, shows
-generally, that, in the product of machinery, the value due to the instruments of labour increases
-relatively, but decreases absolutely. In other words, its absolute amount decreases, but its amount,
-relatively to the total value of the product, of a pound of yarn, for instance, increases.27
-It is evident that whenever it costs as much labour to produce a machine as is saved by the
-employment of that machine, there is nothing but a transposition of labour; consequently the total
-labour required to produce a commodity is not lessened or the productiveness of labour is not
-increased. It is clear, however, that the difference between the labour a machine costs, and the
-labour it saves, in other words, that the degree of its productiveness does not depend on the
-difference between its own value and the value of the implement it replaces. As long as the labour
-spent on a machine, and consequently the portion of its value added to the product, remains
-smaller than the value added by the workman to the product with his tool, there is always a
-difference of labour saved in favour of the machine. The productiveness of a machine is therefore
-measured by the human labour-power it replaces. According to Mr. Baynes, 2 operatives are
-required for the 450 mule spindles, inclusive of preparation machinery,28 that are driven by one-
-horse power; each self-acting mule spindle, working ten hours, produces 13 ounces of yarn
-(average number of thickness); consequently 2½ operatives spin weekly 365 5/8 lbs. of yarn.
-Hence, leaving waste on one side, 366 lbs. of cotton absorb, during their conversion into yarn,
-only 150 hours’ labour, or fifteen days’ labour of ten hours each. But with a spinning-wheel,
-supposing the hand-spinner to produce thirteen ounces of yarn in sixty hours, the same weight of
-cotton would absorb 2,700 days’ labour of ten hours each, or 27,000 hours’ labour.29 Where
-blockprinting, the old method of printing calico by hand, has been superseded by machine
-printing, a single machine prints, with the aid of one man or boy, as much calico of four colours
-in one hour, as it formerly took 200 men to do.30 Before Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin in
-1793, the separation of the seed from a pound of cotton cost an average day’s labour. By means
-of his invention one negress was enabled to clean 100 lbs. daily; and since then, the efficacy of
-the gin has been considerably increased. A pound of cotton wool, previously costing 50 cents to
-produce, included after that invention more unpaid labour, and was consequently sold with
-greater profit, at 10 cents. In India they employ for separating the wool from the seed, an
-instrument, half machine, half tool, called a churka; with this one man and a woman can clean 28
-lbs. daily. With the churka invented some years ago by Dr. Forbes, one man and a boy produce
-250 lbs. daily. If oxen, steam, or water, be used for driving it, only a few boys and girls as feeders
-are required. Sixteen of these machines driven by oxen do as much work in a day as formerly 750
-people did on an average.31
-As already stated, a steam-plough does as much work in one hour at a cost of three-pence, as 66
-men at a cost of 15 shillings. I return to this example in order to clear up an erroneous notion. The
-15 shillings are by no means the expression in money of all the labour expended in one hour by
-the 66 men. If the ratio of surplus labour to necessary labour were 100%, these 66 men would
-produce in one hour a value of 30 shillings, although their wages, 15 shillings, represent only
-their labour for half an hour. Suppose, then, a machine cost as much as the wages for a year of the
-150 men it displaces, say £3,000; this £3,000 is by no means the expression in money of the
-labour added to the object produced by these 150 men before the introduction of the machine, but
-only of that portion of their year’s labour which was expended for themselves and represented by
-their wages. On the other hand, the £3,000, the money-value of the machine, expresses all the
-labour expended on its production, no matter in what proportion this labour constitutes wages for
-the workman, and surplus-value for the capitalist. Therefore, though a machine cost as much as
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-the labour-power displaced by it costs, yet the labour materialised in it is even then much less
-than the living labour it replaces. 32
-The use of machinery for the exclusive purpose of cheapening the product, is limited in this way,
-that less labour must be expended in producing the machinery than is displaced by the
-employment of that machinery, For the capitalist, however, this use is still more limited. Instead
-of paying for the labour, he only pays the value of the labour-power employed; therefore, the
-limit to his using a machine is fixed by the difference between the value of the machine and the
-value of the labour-power replaced by it. Since the division of the day’s work into necessary and
-surplus labour differs in different countries, and even in the same country at different periods, or
-in different branches of industry; and further, since the actual wage of the labourer at one time
-sinks below the value of his labour-power, at another rises above it, it is possible for the
-difference between the price of the machinery and the price of the labour-power replaced by that
-machinery to vary very much, although the difference between the quantity of labour requisite to
-produce the machine and the total quantity replaced by it, remain constant.33 But it is the former
-difference alone that determines the cost, to the capitalist, of producing a commodity, and,
-through the pressure of competition, influences his action. Hence the invention now-a-days of
-machines in England that are employed only in North America; just as in the sixteenth and
-seventeenth centuries, machines were invented in Germany to be used only in Holland, and just
-as many a French invention of the eighteenth century was exploited in England alone. In the older
-countries, machinery, when employed in some branches of industry, creates such a redundancy of
-labour in other branches that in these latter the fall of wages below the value of labour-power
-impedes the use of machinery, and, from the standpoint of the capitalist, whose profit comes, not
-from a diminution of the labour employed, but of the labour paid for, renders that use superfluous
-and often impossible. In some branches of the woollen manufacture in England the employment
-of children has during recent years been considerably diminished, and in some cases has been
-entirely abolished. Why? Because the Factory Acts made two sets of children necessary, one
-working six hours, the other four, or each working five hours. But the parents refused to sell the
-“half-timers” cheaper than the “full-timers.” Hence the substitution of machinery for the “half-
-timers.”34 Before the labour of women and of children under 10 years of age was forbidden in
-mines, capitalists considered the employment of naked women and girls, often in company with
-men, so far sanctioned by their moral code, and especially by their ledgers, that it was only after
-the passing of the Act that they had recourse to machinery. The Yankees have invented a stone-
-breaking machine. The English do not make use of it, because the “wretch” 35who does this work
-gets paid for such a small portion of his labour, that machinery would increase the cost of
-production to the capitalist.36 In England women are still occasionally used instead of horses for
-hauling canal boats37, because the labour required to produce horses and machines is an
-accurately known quantity, while that required to maintain the women of the surplus-population
-is below all calculation. Hence nowhere do we find a more shameful squandering of human
-labour-power for the most despicable purposes than in England, the land of machinery.
-Section 3: The Proximate Effects of Machinery on the
-Workman
-The starting-point of modern industry is, as we have shown, the revolution in the instruments of
-labour, and this revolution attains its most highly developed form in the organised system of
-machinery in a factory. Before we inquire how human material is incorporated with this objective
-organism, let us consider some general effects of this revolution on the labourer himself.
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-A. Appropriation of Supplementary Labour-Power by
-Capital. The Employment of Women and Children
-In so far as machinery dispenses with muscular power, it becomes a means of employing
-labourers of slight muscular strength, and those whose bodily development is incomplete, but
-whose limbs are all the more supple. The labour of women and children was, therefore, the first
-thing sought for by capitalists who used machinery. That mighty substitute for labour and
-labourers was forthwith changed into a means for increasing the number of wage-labourers by
-enrolling, under the direct sway of capital, every member of the workman’s family, without
-distinction of age or sex. Compulsory work for the capitalist usurped the place, not only of the
-children’s play, but also of free labour at home within moderate limits for the support of the
-family.38
-The value of labour-power was determined, not only by the labour-time necessary to maintain the
-individual adult labourer, but also by that necessary to maintain his family. Machinery, by
-throwing every member of that family on to the labour-market, spreads the value of the man’s
-labour-power over his whole family. It thus depreciates his labour-power. To purchase the labour-
-power of a family of four workers may, perhaps, cost more than it formerly did to purchase the
-labour-power of the head of the family, but, in return, four days’ labour takes the place of one,
-and their price falls in proportion to the excess of the surplus labour of four over the surplus
-labour of one. In order that the family may live, four people must now, not only labour, but
-expend surplus labour for the capitalist. Thus we see, that machinery, while augmenting the
-human material that forms the principal object of capital’s exploiting power,39 at the same time
-raises the degree of exploitation.
-Machinery also revolutionises out and out the contract between the labourer and the capitalist,
-which formally fixes their mutual relations. Taking the exchange of commodities as our basis, our
-first assumption was that capitalist and labourer met as free persons, as independent owners of
-commodities; the one possessing money and means of production, the other labour-power. But
-now the capitalist buys children and young persons under age. Previously, the workman sold his
-own labour-power, which he disposed of nominally as a free agent. Now he sells wife and child.
-He has become a slave-dealer.40 The demand for children’s labour often resembles in form the
-inquiries for negro slaves, such as were formerly to be read among the advertisements in
-American journals.
-“My attention,” says an English factory inspector, “was drawn to an advertisement
-in the local paper of one of the most important manufacturing towns of my
-district, of which the following is a copy: Wanted, 12 to 20 young persons, not
-younger than what can pass for 13 years. Wages, 4 shillings a week. Apply &c.” 41
-The phrase “what can pass for 13 years,” has reference to the fact, that by the Factory Act,
-children under 13 years may work only 6 hours. A surgeon officially appointed must certify their
-age. The manufacturer, therefore, asks for children who look as if they were already 13 years old.
-The decrease, often by leaps and bounds in the number of children under 13 years employed in
-factories, a decrease that is shown in an astonishing manner by the English statistics of the last 20
-years, was for the most part, according to the evidence of the factory inspectors themselves, the
-work of the certifying surgeons, who overstated the age of the children, agreeably to the
-capitalist’s greed for exploitation, and the sordid trafficking needs of the parents. In the notorious
-district of Bethnal Green, a public market is held every Monday and Tuesday morning, where
-children of both sexes from 9 years of age upwards, hire themselves out to the silk manufacturers.
-"The usual terms are 1s. 8d. a week (this belongs to the parents) and ‘2d. for myself and tea.’ The
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-contract is binding only for the week. The scene and language while this market is going on are
-quite disgraceful.” 42 It has also occurred in England, that women have taken “children from the
-workhouse and let any one have them out for 2s. 6d. a week.”43 In spite of legislation, the number
-of boys sold in Great Britain by their parents to act as live chimney-sweeping machines (although
-there exist plenty of machines to replace them) exceeds 2,000.44 The revolution effected by
-machinery in the juridical relations between the buyer and the seller of labour-power, causing the
-transaction as a whole to lose the appearance of a contract between free persons, afforded the
-English Parliament an excuse, founded on juridical principles, for the interference of the state
-with factories. Whenever the law limits the labour of children to 6 hours in industries not before
-interfered with, the complaints of the manufacturers are always renewed. They allege that
-numbers of the parents withdraw their children from the industry brought under the Act, in order
-to sell them where “freedom of labour” still rules, i.e., where children under 13 years are
-compelled to work like grown-up people, and therefore can be got rid of at a higher price. But
-since capital is by nature a leveller, since it exacts in every sphere of production equality in the
-conditions of the exploitation of labour, the limitation by law of children’s labour, in one branch
-of industry, becomes the cause of its limitation in others.
-We have already alluded to the physical deterioration as well of the children and young-persons
-as of the women, whom machinery, first directly in the factories that shoot up on its basis, and
-then indirectly in all the remaining branches of industry, subjects to the exploitation of capital. In
-this place, therefore, we dwell only on one point, the enormous mortality, during the first few
-years of their life, of the children of the operatives. In sixteen of the registration districts into
-which England is divided, there are, for every 100,000 children alive under the age of one year,
-only 9,000 deaths in a year on an average (in one district only 7,047); in 24 districts the deaths are
-over 10,000, but under 11,000; in 39 districts, over 11,000, but under 12,000; in 48 districts over
-12,000, but under 13,000; in 22 districts over 20,000; in 25 districts over 21,000; in 17 over
-22,000; in 11 over 23,000; in Hoo, Wolverhampton, Ashton-under-Lyne, and Preston, over
-24,000; in Nottingham, Stockport, and Bradford, over 25,000; in Wisbeach, 16,000; and in
-Manchester, 26,125.45 As was shown by an official medical inquiry in the year 1861, the high
-death-rates are, apart from local causes, principally due to the employment of the mothers away
-from their homes, and to the neglect and maltreatment, consequent on her absence, such as,
-amongst others, insufficient nourishment, unsuitable food, and dosing with opiates; besides this,
-there arises an unnatural estrangement between mother and child, and as a consequence
-intentional starving and poisoning of the children.46 In those agricultural districts, “where a
-minimum in the employment of women exists, the death-rate is on the other hand very low.” 47
-The Inquiry Commission of 1861 led, however, to the unexpected result, that in some purely
-agricultural districts bordering on the North Sea, the death-rate of children under one year old
-almost equalled that of the worst factory districts. Dr. Julian Hunter was therefore commissioned
-to investigate this phenomenon on the spot. His report is incorporated with the “Sixth Report on
-Public Health.”48 Up to that time it was supposed, that the children were decimated by malaria,
-and other diseases peculiar to low-lying and marshy districts. But the inquiry showed the very
-opposite, namely, that the same cause which drove away malaria, the conversion of the land, from
-a morass in winter and a scanty pasture in summer, into fruitful corn land, created the exceptional
-death-rate of the infants.49 The 70 medical men, whom Dr. Hunter examined in that district, were
-“wonderfully in accord” on this point. In fact, the revolution in the mode of cultivation had led to
-the introduction of the industrial system.
-Married women, who work in gangs along with boys and girls, are, for a stipulated sum of
-money, placed at the disposal of the farmer, by a man called the “undertaker,” who contracts for
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-the whole gang. “These gangs will sometimes travel many miles from their own village; they are
-to be met morning and evening on the roads, dressed in short petticoats, with suitable coats and
-boots, and sometimes trousers, looking wonderfully strong and healthy, but tainted with a
-customary immorality and heedless of the fatal results which their love of this busy and
-independent life is bringing on their unfortunate offspring who are pining at home.”50
-Every phenomenon of the factory districts is here reproduced, including, but to a greater extent,
-ill-disguised infanticide, and dosing children with opiates.51
-“My knowledge of such evils,” says Dr. Simon, the medical officer of the Privy
-Council and editor in chief of the Reports on Public Health, “may excuse the
-profound misgiving with which I regard any large industrial employment of adult
-women.”52
-“Happy indeed,” exclaims Mr. Baker, the factory inspector, in his official report, “happy indeed
-will it be for the manufacturing districts of England, when every married woman having a family
-is prohibited from working in any textile works at all.”53
-The moral degradation caused by the capitalistic exploitation of women and children has been so
-exhaustively depicted by F. Engels in his “Lage der Arbeitenden Klasse Englands,” and other
-writers, that I need only mention the subject in this place. But the intellectual desolation
-artificially produced by converting immature human beings into mere machines for the
-fabrication of surplus-value, a state of mind clearly distinguishable from that natural ignorance
-which keeps the mind fallow without destroying its capacity for development, its natural fertility,
-this desolation finally compelled even the English Parliament to make elementary education a
-compulsory condition to the “productive” employment of children under 14 years, in every
-industry subject to the Factory Acts. The spirit of capitalist production stands out clearly in the
-ludicrous wording of the so-called education clauses in the Factory Acts, in the absence of an
-administrative machinery, an absence that again makes the compulsion illusory, in the opposition
-of the manufacturers themselves to these education clauses, and in the tricks and dodges they put
-in practice for evading them.
-“For this the legislature is alone to blame, by having passed a delusive law, which,
-while it would seem to provide that the children employed in factories shall be
-educated, contains no enactment by which that professed end can be secured. It
-provides nothing more than that the children shall on certain days of the week, and
-for a certain number of hours (three) in each day, be inclosed within the four walls
-of a place called a school, and that the employer of the child shall receive weekly
-a certificate to that effect signed by a person designated by the subscriber as a
-schoolmaster or schoolmistress.”54
-Previous to the passing of the amended Factory Act, 1844, it happened, not unfrequently, that the
-certificates of attendance at school were signed by the schoolmaster or schoolmistress with a
-cross, as they themselves were unable to write.
-“On one occasion, on visiting a place called a school, from which certificates of
-school attendance, had issued, I was so struck with the ignorance of the master,
-that I said to him: ‘Pray, sir, can you read?’ His reply was: ‘Aye, summat!’ and as
-a justification of his right to grant certificates, he added: ‘At any rate, I am before
-my scholars.’”
-The inspectors, when the Bill of 1844 was in preparation, did not fail to represent the disgraceful
-state of the places called schools, certificates from which they were obliged to admit as a
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-compliance with the laws, but they were successful only in obtaining thus much, that since the
-passing of the Act of 1845,
-the figures in the school certificate must be filled up in the handwriting of the
-schoolmaster, who must also sign his Christian and surname in full.”55
-Sir John Kincaid, factory inspector for Scotland, relates experiences of the same kind.
-“The first school we visited was kept by a Mrs. Ann Killin. Upon asking her to
-spell her name, she straightway made a mistake, by beginning with the letter C,
-but correcting herself immediately, she said her name began with a K. On looking
-at her signature, however, in the school certificate books, I noticed that she spelt it
-in various ways, while her handwriting left no doubt as to her unfitness to teach.
-She herself also acknowledged that she could not keep the register ... In a second
-school I found the schoolroom 15 feet long, and 10 feet wide, and counted in this
-space 75 children, who were gabbling something unintelligible”56 But it is not
-only in the miserable places above referred to that the children obtain certificates
-of school attendance without having received instruction of any value, for in many
-schools where there is a competent teacher, his efforts are of little avail from the
-distracting crowd of children of all ages, from infants of 3 years old and upwards;
-his livelihood, miserable at the best, depending on the pence received from the
-greatest number of children whom it is possible to cram into the space. To this is
-to be added scanty school furniture, deficiency of books, and other materials for
-teaching, and the depressing effect upon the poor children themselves of a close,
-noisome atmosphere. I have been in many such schools, where I have seen rows
-of children doing absolutely nothing; and this is certified as school attendance,
-and, in statistical returns, such children are set down as being educated.”57
-In Scotland the manufacturers try all they can to do without the children that are obliged to attend
-school.
-“It requires no further argument to prove that the educational clauses of the
-Factory Act, being held in such disfavour among mill-owners, tend in a great
-measure to exclude that class of children alike from the employment and the
-benefit of education contemplated by this Act.”58
-Horribly grotesque does this appear in print works, which are regulated by a special Act. By that
-Act,
-“every child, before being employed in a print work must have attended school for
-at least 30 days, and not less than 150 hours, during the six months immediately
-preceding such first day of employment, and during the continuance of its
-employment in the print works, it must attend for a like period of 30 days, and 150
-hours during every successive period of six months.... The attendance at school
-must be between 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. No attendance of less than 2½ hours, nor more
-than 5 hours on any one day, shall be reckoned as part of the 150 hours. Under
-ordinary circumstances the children attend school morning and afternoon for 30
-days, for at least 5 hours each day, and upon the expiration of the 30 days, the
-statutory total of 150 hours having been attained, having, in their language, made
-up their book, they return to the print work, where they continue until the six
-months have expired, when another instalment of school attendance becomes due,
-and they again seek the school until the book is again made up.... Many boys
-having attended school for the required number of hours, when they return to
-275 Chapter 15
-school after the expiration of their six months’ work in the print work, are in the
-same condition as when they first attended school as print-work boys, that they
-have lost all they gained by their previous school attendance.... In other print
-works the children’s attendance at school is made to depend altogether upon the
-exigencies of the work in the establishment. The requisite number of hours is
-made up each six months, by instalments consisting of from 3 to 5 hours at a time,
-spreading over, perhaps, the whole six months.... For instance, the attendance on
-one day might be from 8 to 11 a.m., on another day from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m., and the
-child might not appear at school again for several days, when it would attend from
-3 p.m. to 6 p.m.; then it might attend for 3 or 4 days consecutively, or for a week,
-then it would not appear in school for 3 weeks or a month, after that upon some
-odd days at some odd hours when the operative who employed it chose to spare it;
-and thus the child was, as it were, buffeted from school to work, from work to
-school, until the tale of 150 hours was told.”59
-By the excessive addition of women and children to the ranks of the workers, machinery at last
-breaks down the resistance which the male operatives in the manufacturing period continued to
-oppose to the despotism of capital.60
-B. Prolongation of the Working day
-If machinery be the most powerful means for increasing the productiveness of labour – i.e., for
-shortening the working-time required in the production of a commodity, it becomes in the hands
-of capital the most powerful means, in those industries first invaded by it, for lengthening the
-working day beyond all bounds set by human nature. It creates, on the one hand, new conditions
-by which capital is enabled to give free scope to this its constant tendency, and on the other hand,
-new motives with which to whet capital’s appetite for the labour of others.
-In the first place, in the form of machinery, the implements of labour become automatic, things
-moving and working independent of the workman. They are thenceforth an industrial perpetuum
-mobile, that would go on producing forever, did it not meet with certain natural obstructions in
-the weak bodies and the strong wills of its human attendants. The automaton, as capital, and
-because it is capital, is endowed, in the person of the capitalist, with intelligence and will; it is
-therefore animated by the longing to reduce to a minimum the resistance offered by that repellent
-yet elastic natural barrier, man.61 This resistance is moreover lessened by the apparent lightness
-of machine work, and by the more pliant and docile character of the women and children
-employed on it.62
-The productiveness of machinery is, as we saw, inversely proportional to the value transferred by
-it to the product. The longer the life of the machine, the greater is the mass of the products over
-which the value transmitted by the machine is spread, and the less is the portion of that value
-added to each single commodity. The active lifetime of a machine is, however, clearly dependent
-on the length of the working day, or on the duration of the daily labour-process multiplied by the
-number of days for which the process is carried on.
-The wear and tear of a machine is not exactly proportional to its working-time. And even if it
-were so, a machine working 16 hours daily for 7½ years, covers as long a working period as, and
-transmits to the total product no more value than, the same machine would if it worked only 8
-hours daily for 15 years. But in the first case the value of the machine would be reproduced twice
-as quickly as in the latter, and the capitalist would, by this use of the machine, absorb in 7½ years
-as much surplus-value as in the second case he would in 15.
-276 Chapter 15
-The material wear and tear of a machine is of two kinds. The one arises from use, as coins wear
-away by circulating, the other from non-use, as a sword rusts when left in its scabbard. The latter
-kind is due to the elements. The former is more or less directly proportional, the latter to a certain
-extent inversely proportional, to the use of the machine.63
-But in addition to the material wear and tear, a machine also undergoes, what we may call a moral
-depreciation. It loses exchange-value, either by machines of the same sort being produced
-cheaper than it, or by better machines entering into competition with it.64 In both cases, be the
-machine ever so young and full of life, its value is no longer determined by the labour actually
-materialised in it, but by the labour-time requisite to reproduce either it or the better machine. It
-has, therefore, lost value more or less. The shorter the period taken to reproduce its total value,
-the less is the danger of moral depreciation; and the longer the working day, the shorter is that
-period. When machinery is first introduced into an industry, new methods of reproducing it more
-cheaply follow blow upon blow65, and so do improvements, that not only affect individual parts
-and details of the machine, but its entire build. It is, therefore, in the early days of the life of
-machinery that this special incentive to the prolongation of the working day makes itself felt most
-acutely.66
-Given the length of the working day, all other circumstances remaining the same, the exploitation
-of double the number of workmen demands, not only a doubling of that part of constant capital
-which is invested in machinery and buildings, but also of that part which is laid out in raw
-material and auxiliary substances. The lengthening of the working day, on the other hand, allows
-of production on an extended scale without any alteration in the amount of capital laid out on
-machinery and buildings.67 Not only is there, therefore, an increase of surplus-value, but the
-outlay necessary to obtain it diminishes. It is true that this takes place, more or less, with every
-lengthening of the working day; but in the case under consideration, the change is more marked,
-because the capital converted into the instruments of labour preponderates to a greater degree. 68
-The development of the factory system fixes a constantly increasing portion of the capital in a
-form, in which, on the one hand, its value is capable of continual self-expansion, and in which, on
-the other hand, it loses both use-value and exchange-value whenever it loses contact with living
-labour. “When a labourer,” said Mr. Ashworth, a cotton magnate, to Professor Nassau W. Senior,
-“lays down his spade, he renders useless, for that period, a capital worth eighteen-pence. When
-one of our people leaves the mill, he renders useless a capital that has cost £100,000.”69 Only
-fancy! making “useless” for a single moment, a capital that has cost £100,000! It is, in truth,
-monstrous, that a single one of our people should ever leave the factory! The increased use of
-machinery, as Senior after the instruction he received from Ashworth clearly perceives, makes a
-constantly increasing lengthening of the working day “desirable.” 70
-Machinery produces relative surplus-value; not only by directly depreciating the value of labour-
-power, and by indirectly cheapening the same through cheapening the commodities that enter into
-its reproduction, but also, when it is first introduced sporadically into an industry, by converting
-the labour employed by the owner of that machinery, into labour of a higher degree and greater
-efficacy, by raising the social value of the article produced above its individual value, and thus
-enabling the capitalist to replace the value of a day’s labour-power by a smaller portion of the
-value of a day’s product. During this transition period, when the use of machinery is a sort of
-monopoly, the profits are therefore exceptional, and the capitalist endeavours to exploit
-thoroughly “the sunny time of this his first love,” by prolonging the working day as much as
-possible. The magnitude of the profit whets his appetite for more profit.
-As the use of machinery becomes more general in a particular industry, the social value of the
-product sinks down to its individual value, and the law that surplus-value does not arise from the
-277 Chapter 15
-labour-power that has been replaced by the machinery, but from the labour-power actually
-employed in working with the machinery, asserts itself. Surplus-value arises from variable capital
-alone, and we saw that the amount of surplus-value depends on two factors, viz., the rate of
-surplus-value and the number of the workmen simultaneously employed. Given the length of the
-working day, the rate of surplus-value is determined by the relative duration of the necessary
-labour and of the surplus labour in a day. The number of the labourers simultaneously employed
-depends, on its side, on the ratio of the variable to the constant capital. Now, however much the
-use of machinery may increase the surplus labour at the expense of the necessary labour by
-heightening the productiveness of labour, it is clear that it attains this result, only by diminishing
-the number of workmen employed by a given amount of capital. It converts what was formerly
-variable capital, invested in labour-power, into machinery which, being constant capital, does not
-produce surplus-value. It is impossible, for instance, to squeeze as much surplus-value out of 2 as
-out of 24 labourers. If each of these 24 men gives only one hour of surplus labour in 12, the 24
-men give together 24 hours of surplus labour, while 24 hours is the total labour of the two men.
-Hence, the application of machinery to the production of surplus-value implies a contradiction
-which is immanent in it, since of the two factors of the surplus-value created by a given amount
-of capital, one, the rate of surplus-value, cannot be increased, except by diminishing the other, the
-number of workmen. This contradiction comes to light, as soon as by the general employment of
-machinery in a given industry, the value of the machine-produced commodity regulates the value
-of all commodities of the same sort; and it is this contradiction, that in its turn, drives the
-capitalist, without his being conscious of the fact,71 to excessive lengthening of the working day,
-in order that he may compensate the decrease in the relative number of labourers exploited, by an
-increase not only of the relative, but of the absolute surplus labour.
-If, then, the capitalistic employment of machinery, on the one hand, supplies new and powerful
-motives to an excessive lengthening of the working day, and radically changes, as well the
-methods of labour, as also the character of the social working organism, in such a manner as to
-break down all opposition to this tendency, on the other hand it produces, partly by opening out to
-the capitalist new strata of the working-class, previously inaccessible to him, partly by setting free
-the labourers it supplants, a surplus working population,72 which is compelled to submit to the
-dictation of capital. Hence that remarkable phenomenon in the history of modern industry, that
-machinery sweeps away every moral and natural restriction on the length of the working day.
-Hence, too, the economic paradox, that the most powerful instrument for shortening labour-time,
-becomes the most unfailing means for placing every moment of the labourer’s time and that of his
-family, at the disposal of the capitalist for the purpose of expanding the value of his capital. “If,”
-dreamed Aristotle, the greatest thinker of antiquity, “if every tool, when summoned, or even of its
-own accord, could do the work that befits it, just as the creations of Daedalus moved of
-themselves, or the tripods of Hephaestos went of their own accord to their sacred work, if the
-weavers’ shuttles were to weave of themselves, then there would be no need either of apprentices
-for the master workers, or of slaves for the lords.” 73And Antipatros, a Greek poet of the time of
-Cicero, hailed the invention of the water-wheel for grinding corn, an invention that is the
-elementary form of all machinery, as the giver of freedom to female slaves, and the bringer back
-of the golden age.74 Oh! those heathens! They understood, as the learned Bastiat, and before him
-the still wiser MacCulloch have discovered, nothing of Political Economy and Christianity. They
-did not, for example, comprehend that machinery is the surest means of lengthening the working
-day. They perhaps excused the slavery of one on the ground that it was a means to the full
-development of another. But to preach slavery of the masses, in order that a few crude and half-
-educated parvenus, might become “eminent spinners,” “extensive sausage-makers,” and
-“influential shoe-black dealers,” to do this, they lacked the bump of Christianity.
-278 Chapter 15
-C. Intensification of Labour
-The immoderate lengthening of the working day, produced by machinery in the hands of capital,
-leads to a reaction on the part of society, the very sources of whose life are menaced; and, thence,
-to a normal working day whose length is fixed by law. Thenceforth a phenomenon that we have
-already met with, namely, the intensification of labour, develops into great importance. Our
-analysis of absolute surplus-value had reference primarily to the extension or duration of the
-labour, its intensity being assumed as given. We now proceed to consider the substitution of a
-more intensified labour for labour of more extensive duration, and the degree of the former.
-It is self-evident, that in proportion as the use of machinery spreads, and the experience of a
-special class of workmen habituated to machinery accumulates, the rapidity and intensity of
-labour increase as a natural consequence. Thus in England, during half a century, lengthening of
-the working day went hand in hand with increasing intensity of factory labour. Nevertheless the
-reader will clearly see, that where we have labour, not carried on by fits and starts, but repeated
-day after day with unvarying uniformity, a point must inevitably be reached, where extension of
-the working day and intensity of the labour mutually exclude one another, in such a way that
-lengthening of the working day becomes compatible only with a lower degree of intensity, and a
-higher degree of intensity, only with a shortening of the working day. So soon as the gradually
-surging revolt of the working-class compelled Parliament to shorten compulsorily the hours of
-labour, and to begin by imposing a normal working day on factories proper, so soon consequently
-as an increased production of surplus-value by the prolongation of the working day was once for
-all put a stop to, from that moment capital threw itself with all its might into the production of
-relative surplus-value, by hastening on the further improvement of machinery. At the same time a
-change took place in the nature of relative surplus-value. Generally speaking, the mode of
-producing relative surplus-value consists in raising the productive power of the workman, so as to
-enable him to produce more in a given time with the same expenditure of labour. Labour-time
-continues to transmit as before the same value to the total product, but this unchanged amount of
-exchange-value is spread over more use-value; hence the value of each single commodity sinks.
-Otherwise, however, so soon as the compulsory shortening of the hours of labour takes place. The
-immense impetus it gives the development of productive power, and to economy in the means of
-production, imposes on the workman increased expenditure of labour in a given time, heightened
-tension of labour-power, and closer filling up of the pores of the working day, or condensation of
-labour to a degree that is attainable only within the limits of the shortened working day. This
-condensation of a greater mass of labour into a given period thenceforward counts for what it
-really is, a greater quantity of labour. In addition to a measure of its extension, i.e., duration,
-labour now acquires a measure of its intensity or of the degree of its condensation or density.75
-The denser hour of the ten hours’ working day contains more labour, i.e., expended labour-power
-than the more porous hour of the twelve hours’ working day. The product therefore of one of the
-former hours has as much or more value than has the product of 1 1/5 of the latter hours. Apart
-from the increased yield of relative surplus-value through the heightened productiveness of
-labour, the same mass of value is now produced for the capitalist say by 3 1/3 hours of surplus
-labour, and 6 2/3 hours of necessary labour, as was previously produced by four hours of surplus
-labour and eight hours of necessary labour.
-We now come to the question: How is the labour intensified?
-The first effect of shortening the working day results from the self-evident law, that the efficiency
-of labour-power is in an inverse ratio to the duration of its expenditure. Hence, within certain
-limits what is lost by shortening the duration is gained by the increasing tension of labour-power.
-That the workman moreover really does expend more labour-power, is ensured by the mode in
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-which the capitalist pays him.76 In those industries, such as potteries, where machinery plays little
-or no part, the introduction of the Factory Acts has strikingly shown that the mere shortening of
-the working day increases to a wonderful degree the regularity, uniformity, order, continuity, and
-energy of the labour.77 It seemed, however, doubtful whether this effect was produced in the
-factory proper, where the dependence of the workman on the continuous and uniform motion of
-the machinery had already created the strictest discipline. Hence, when in 1844 the reduction of
-the working day to less than twelve hours was being debated, the masters almost unanimously
-declared
-“that their overlookers in the different rooms took good care that the hands lost no
-time,” that “the extent of vigilance and attention on the part of the workmen was
-hardly capable of being increased,” and, therefore, that the speed of the machinery
-and other conditions remaining unaltered, “to expect in a well-managed factory
-any important result from increased attention of the workmen was an absurdity.”78
-This assertion was contradicted by experiments. Mr. Robert Gardner reduced the hours of labour
-in his two large factories at Preston, on and after the 20th April, 1844, from twelve to eleven
-hours a day. The result of about a year’s working was that “the same amount of product for the
-same cost was received, and the workpeople as a whole earned in eleven hours as much wages as
-they did before in twelve.”79 I pass over the experiments made in the spinning and carding rooms,
-because they were accompanied by an increase of 2% in the speed of the machines. But in the
-weaving department, where, moreover, many sorts of figured fancy articles were woven, there
-was not the slightest alteration in the conditions of the work. The result was: “From 6th January
-to 20th April, 1844, with a twelve hours’ day, average weekly wages of each hand 10s. 1½d.,
-from 20th April to 29th June, 1844, with day of eleven hours, average weekly wages 10s. 3½d.”80
-Here we have more produced in eleven hours than previously in twelve, and entirely in
-consequence of more steady application and economy of time by the workpeople. While they got
-the same wages and gained one hour of spare time, the capitalist got the same amount produced
-and saved the cost of coal, gas, and other such items, for one hour. Similar experiments, and with
-the like success, were carried out in the mills of Messrs. Horrocks and Jacson.81
-The shortening of the hours of labour creates, to begin with, the subjective conditions for the
-condensation of labour, by enabling the workman to exert more strength in a given time. So soon
-as that shortening becomes compulsory, machinery becomes in the hands of capital the objective
-means, systematically employed for squeezing out more labour in a given time. This is effected in
-two ways: by increasing the speed of the machinery, and by giving the workman more machinery
-to tent. Improved construction of the machinery is necessary, partly because without it greater
-pressure cannot be put on the workman, and partly because the shortened hours of labour force
-the capitalist to exercise the strictest watch over the cost of production. The improvements in the
-steam-engine have increased the piston speed, and at the same time have made it possible, by
-means of a greater economy of power, to drive with the same or even a smaller consumption of
-coal more machinery with the same engine. The improvements in the transmitting mechanism
-have lessened friction, and, what so strikingly distinguishes modern from the older machinery,
-have reduced the diameter and weight of the shafting to a constantly decreasing minimum.
-Finally, the improvements in the operative machines have, while reducing their size, increased
-their speed and efficiency, as in the modern power-loom; or, while increasing the size of their
-framework, have also increased the extent and number of their working parts, as in spinning-
-mules, or have added to the speed of these working parts by imperceptible alterations of detail,
-such as those which ten years ago increased the speed of the spindles in self-acting mules by one-
-fifth.
-280 Chapter 15
-The reduction of the working day to 12 hours dates in England from 1832. In 1836 a
-manufacturer stated:
-“The labour now undergone in the factories is much greater than it used to be ...
-compared with thirty or forty years ago ... owing to the greater attention and
-activity required by the greatly increased speed which is given to the
-machinery.”82
-In the year 1844, Lord Ashley, now Lord Shaftesbury, made in the House of Commons the
-following statements, supported by documentary evidence:
-“The labour performed by those engaged in the processes of manufacture, is three
-times as great as in the beginning of such operations. Machinery has executed, no
-doubt, the work that would demand the sinews of millions of men; but it has also
-prodigiously multiplied the labour of those who are governed by its fearful
-movements.... In 1815, the labour of following a pair of mules spinning cotton of
-No. 40 – reckoning 12 hours to the working day – involved a necessity of walking
-8 miles. In 1832, the distance travelled in following a pair of mules, spinning
-cotton yarn of the same number, was 20 miles, and frequently more. In 1835”
-(query – 1815 or 1825?) “the spinner put up daily, on each of these mules, 820
-stretches, making a total of 1,640 stretches in the course of the day. In 1832, the
-spinner put up on each mule 2,200 stretches, making a total of 4,400. In 1844,
-2,400 stretches, making a total of 4,800; and in some cases the amount of labour
-required is even still greater.... I have another document sent to me in 1842,
-stating that the labour is progressively increasing ‒ increasing not only because
-the distance to be travelled is greater, but because the quantity of goods produced
-is multiplied, while the hands are fewer in proportion than before; and, moreover,
-because an inferior species of cotton is now often spun, which it is more difficult
-to work.... In the carding-room there has also been a great increase of labour. One
-person there does the work formerly divided between two. In the weaving-room,
-where a vast number of persons are employed, and principally females ... the
-labour has increased within the last few years fully 10 per cent., owing to the
-increased speed of the machinery in spinning. In 1838, the number of hanks spun
-per week was 18,000, in 1843 it amounted to 21,000. In 1819, the number of picks
-in power-loom-weaving per minute was 60 – in 1842 it was 140, showing a vast
-increase of labour.”83
-In the face of this remarkable intensity of labour which had already been reached in 1844 under
-the Twelve Hours’ Act, there appeared to be a justification for the assertion made at that time by
-the English manufacturers, that any further progress in that direction was impossible, and
-therefore that every further reduction of the hours of labour meant a lessened production. The
-apparent correctness of their reasons will be best shown by the following contemporary statement
-by Leonard Horner, the factory inspector, their ever watchful censor.
-“Now, as the quantity produced must, in the main, be regulated by the speed of
-the machinery, it must be the interest of the mill-owner to drive it at the utmost
-rate of speed consistent with these following conditions, viz., the preservation of
-the machinery from too rapid deterioration; the preservation of the quality of the
-article manufactured; and the capability of the workman to follow the motion
-without a greater exertion than he can sustain for a constancy. One of the most
-important problems, therefore, which the owner of a factory has to solve is to find
-out the maximum speed at which he can run, with a due regard to the above
-281 Chapter 15
-conditions. It frequently happens that he finds he has gone too fast, that breakages
-and bad work more than counterbalance the increased speed, and that he is
-obliged to slacken his pace. I therefore concluded, that as an active and intelligent
-mill-owner would find out the safe maximum, it would not be possible to produce
-as much in eleven hours as in twelve. I further assumed that the operative paid by
-piecework, would exert himself to the utmost consistent with the power of
-continuing at the same rate.”84
-Horner, therefore, came to the conclusion that a reduction of the working hours below twelve
-would necessarily diminish production.85 He himself, ten years later, cites his opinion of 1845 in
-proof of how much he under-estimated in that year the elasticity of machinery, and of man’s
-labour-power, both of which are simultaneously stretched to an extreme by the compulsory
-shortening of the working day.
-We now come to the period that follows the introduction of the Ten Hours’ Act in 1847 into the
-English cotton, woollen, silk, and flax mills.
-“The speed of the spindles has increased upon throstles 500, and upon mules
-1,000 revolutions a minute, i.e., the speed of the throstle spindle, which in 1839
-was 4,500 times a minute, is now (1862) 5,000; and of the mule spindle, that was
-5,000, is now 6,000 times a minute, amounting in the former case to one-tenth,
-and in the second case to one-fifth additional increase.” 86
-James Nasmyth, the eminent civil engineer of Patricroft, near Manchester, explained in a letter to
-Leonard Horner, written in 1852, the nature of the improvements in the steam-engine that had
-been made between the years 1848 and 1852. After remarking that the horse-power of steam-
-engines, being always estimated in the official returns according to the power of similar engines
-in 182887, is only nominal, and can serve only as an index of their real power, he goes on to say:
-“I am confident that from the same weight of steam-engine machinery, we are
-now obtaining at least 50 per cent. more duty or work performed on the average,
-and that in many cases the identical steam-engines which in the days of the
-restricted speed of 220 feet per minute, yielded 50 horsepower, are now yielding
-upwards of 100...” "The modern steam-engine of 100 horse-power is capable of
-being driven at a much greater force than formerly, arising from improvements in
-its construction, the capacity and construction of the boilers, &c....” “Although the
-same number of hands are employed in proportion to the horse-power as at former
-periods, there are fewer hands employed in proportion to the machinery.”88 “In the
-year 1850, the factories of the United Kingdom employed 134,217 nominal horse-
-power to give motion to 25,638,716 spindles and 301,445 looms. The number of
-spindles and looms in 1856 was respectively 33,503,580 of the former, and
-369,205 of the latter, which, reckoning the force of the nominal horse-power
-required to be the same as in 1850, would require a force equal to 175,000 horses,
-but the actual power given in the return for 1856 is 161,435, less by above 10,000
-horses than, calculating upon the basis of the return of 1850, the factories ought to
-have required in 1856.” 89 “The facts thus brought out by the Return (of 1856)
-appear to be that the factory system is increasing rapidly; that although the same
-number of hands are employed in proportion to the horse-power as at former
-periods, there are fewer hands employed in proportion to the machinery; that the
-steam-engine is enabled to drive an increased weight of machinery by economy of
-force and other methods, and that an increased quantity of work can be turned off
-282 Chapter 15
-by improvements in machinery, and in methods of manufacture, by increase of
-speed of the machinery, and by a variety of other causes.” 90
-“The great improvements made in machines of every kind have raised their
-productive power very much. Without any doubt, the shortening of the hours of
-labour... gave the impulse to these improvements. The latter, combined with the
-more intense strain on the workman, have had the effect, that at least as much is
-produced in the shortened (by two hours or one-sixth) working day as was
-previously produced during the longer one.”91
-One fact is sufficient to show how greatly the wealth of the manufacturers increased along with
-the more intense exploitation of labour-power. From 1838 to 1850, the average proportional
-increase in English cotton and other factories was 32%, while from 1850 to 1856 it amounted to
-86%.
-But however great the progress of English industry had been during the 8 years from 1848 to
-1856 under the influence of a working day of 10 hours, it was far surpassed during the next
-period of 6 years from 1856 to 1862. In silk factories, for instance, there were in 1856, spindles
-1,093,799; in 1862, 1,388,544; in 1856, looms 9,260; in 1862, 10,709. But the number of
-operatives was, in 1856, 56,131; in 1862, 52,429. The increase in the spindles was therefore
-26.9% and in the looms 15.6%, while the number of the operatives decreased 7%. In the year
-1850 there were employed in worsted mills 875,830 spindles; in 1856, 1,324,549 (increase
-51.2%), and in 1862, 1,289,172 (decrease 2.7%). But if we deduct the doubling spindles that
-figure in the numbers for 1856, but not in those for 1862, it will be found that after 1856 the
-number of spindles remained nearly stationary. On the other hand, after 1850, the speed of the
-spindles and looms was in many cases doubled. The number of power-looms in worsted mills
-was, in 1850, 32,617; in 1856, 38,956; in 1862, 43,048. The number of the operatives was, in
-1850, 79,737; in 1856, 87,794; in 1862, 86,063; included in these, however, the children under 14
-years of age were, in 1850, 9,956; in 1856, 11,228; in 1862, 13,178. In spite, therefore, of the
-greatly increased number of looms in 1862, compared with 1856, the total number of the
-workpeople employed decreased, and that of the children exploited increased.92
-On the 27th April, 1863, Mr. Ferrand said in the House of Commons:
-“I have been informed by delegates from 16 districts of Lancashire and Cheshire,
-in whose behalf I speak, that the work in the factories is, in consequence of the
-improvements in machinery, constantly on the increase. Instead of as formerly one
-person with two helps tenting two looms, one person now tents three looms
-without helps, and it is no uncommon thing for one person to tent four. Twelve
-hours’ work, as is evident from the facts adduced, is now compressed into less
-than 10 hours. It is therefore self-evident, to what an enormous extent the toil of
-the factory operative has increased during the last 10 years.”93
-Although, therefore, the Factory Inspectors unceasingly and with justice, commend the results of
-the Acts of 1844 and 1850, yet they admit that the shortening of the hours of labour has already
-called forth such an intensification of the labour as is injurious to the health of the workman and
-to his capacity for work.
-“In most of the cotton, worsted, and silk mills, an exhausting state of excitement
-necessary to enable the workers satisfactorily to mind the machinery, the motion
-of which has been greatly accelerated within the last few years, seems to me not
-unlikely to be one of the causes of that excess of mortality from lung disease,
-which Dr. Greenhow has pointed out in his recent report on this subject.”94
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-There cannot be the slightest doubt that the tendency that urges capital, so soon as a prolongation
-of the hours of labour is once for all forbidden, to compensate itself, by a systematic heightening
-of the intensity of labour, and to convert every improvement in machinery into a more perfect
-means of exhausting the workman, must soon lead to a state of things in which a reduction of the
-hours of labour will again be inevitable.95 On the other hand, the rapid advance of English
-industry between 1848 and the present time, under the influence of a day of 10 hours, surpasses
-the advance made between 1833 and 1847, when the day was 12 hours long, by far more than the
-latter surpasses the advance made during the half century after the first introduction of the factory
-system, when the working day was without limits.96
-Section 4: The Factory
-At the commencement of this chapter we considered that which we may call the body of the
-factory, i.e., machinery organised into a system. We there saw how machinery, by annexing the
-labour of women and children, augments the number of human beings who form the material for
-capitalistic exploitation, how it confiscates the whole of the workman’s disposable time, by
-immoderate extension of the hours of labour, and how finally its progress, which allows of
-enormous increase of production in shorter and shorter periods, serves as a means of
-systematically getting more work done in a shorter time, or of exploiting labour-power more
-intensely. We now turn to the factory as a whole, and that in its most perfect form.
-Dr. Ure, the Pindar of the automatic factory, describes it, on the one hand, as
-“Combined co-operation of many orders of workpeople, adult and young, in
-tending with assiduous skill, a system of productive machines, continuously
-impelled by a central power” (the prime mover); on the other hand, as “a vast
-automaton, composed of various mechanical and intellectual organs, acting in
-uninterrupted concert for the production of a common object, all of them being
-subordinate to a self-regulated moving force.”
-These two descriptions are far from being identical. In one, the collective labourer, or social body
-of labour, appears as the dominant subject, and the mechanical automaton as the object; in the
-other, the automaton itself is the subject, and the workmen are merely conscious organs, co-
-ordinate with the unconscious organs of the automaton, and together with them, subordinated to
-the central moving-power. The first description is applicable to every possible employment of
-machinery on a large scale, the second is characteristic of its use by capital, and therefore of the
-modern factory system. Ure prefers therefore, to describe the central machine, from which the
-motion comes, not only as an automaton, but as an autocrat. “In these spacious halls the
-benignant power of steam summons around him his myriads of willing menials.”97
-Along with the tool, the skill of the workman in handling it passes over to the machine. The
-capabilities of the tool are emancipated from the restraints that are inseparable from human
-labour-power. Thereby the technical foundation on which is based the division of labour in
-Manufacture, is swept away. Hence, in the place of the hierarchy of specialised workmen that
-characterises manufacture, there steps, in the automatic factory, a tendency to equalise and reduce
-to one and the same level every kind of work that has to be done by the minders of the
-machines;98 in the place of the artificially produced differentiations of the detail workmen, step
-the natural differences of age and sex.
-So far as division of labour re-appears in the factory, it is primarily a distribution of the workmen
-among the specialised machines; and of masses of workmen, not however organised into groups,
-among the various departments of the factory, in each of which they work at a number of similar
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-machines placed together; their co-operation, therefore, is only simple. The organised group,
-peculiar to manufacture, is replaced by the connexion between the head workman and his few
-assistants. The essential division is, into workmen who are actually employed on the machines
-(among whom are included a few who look after the engine), and into mere attendants (almost
-exclusively children) of these workmen. Among the attendants are reckoned more or less all
-“Feeders” who supply the machines with the material to be worked. In addition to these two
-principal classes, there is a numerically unimportant class of persons, whose occupation it is to
-look after the whole of the machinery and repair it from time to time; such as engineers,
-mechanics, joiners, &c. This is a superior class of workmen, some of them scientifically
-educated, others brought up to a trade; it is distinct from the factory operative class, and merely
-aggregated to it.99 This division of labour is purely technical.
-To work at a machine, the workman should be taught from childhood, in order that he may learn
-to adapt his own movements to the uniform and unceasing motion of an automaton. When the
-machinery, as a whole, forms a system of manifold machines, working simultaneously and in
-concert, the co-operation based upon it, requires the distribution of various groups of workmen
-among the different kinds of machines. But the employment of machinery does away with the
-necessity of crystallising this distribution after the manner of Manufacture, by the constant
-annexation of a particular man to a particular function.100 Since the motion of the whole system
-does not proceed from the workman, but from the machinery, a change of persons can take place
-at any time without an interruption of the work. The most striking proof of this is afforded by the
-relays system, put into operation by the manufacturers during their revolt from 1848-1850. Lastly,
-the quickness with which machine work is learnt by young people, does away with the necessity
-of bringing up for exclusive employment by machinery, a special class of operatives.101 With
-regard to the work of the mere attendants, it can, to some extent, be replaced in the mill by
-machines,102 and owing to its extreme simplicity, it allows of a rapid and constant change of the
-individuals burdened with this drudgery.
-Although then, technically speaking, the old system of division of labour is thrown overboard by
-machinery, it hangs on in the factory, as a traditional habit handed down from Manufacture, and
-is afterwards systematically re-moulded and established in a more hideous form by capital, as a
-means of exploiting labour-power. The life-long speciality of handling one and the same tool,
-now becomes the life-long speciality of serving one and the same machine. Machinery is put to a
-wrong use, with the object of transforming the workman, from his very childhood, into a part of a
-detail-machine.103 In this way, not only are the expenses of his reproduction considerably
-lessened, but at the same time his helpless dependence upon the factory as a whole, and therefore
-upon the capitalist, is rendered complete. Here as everywhere else, we must distinguish between
-the increased productiveness due to the development of the social process of production, and that
-due to the capitalist exploitation of that process. In handicrafts and manufacture, the workman
-makes use of a tool, in the factory, the machine makes use of him. There the movements of the
-instrument of labour proceed from him, here it is the movements of the machine that he must
-follow. In manufacture the workmen are parts of a living mechanism. In the factory we have a
-lifeless mechanism independent of the workman, who becomes its mere living appendage.
-“The miserable routine of endless drudgery and toil in which the same mechanical
-process is gone through over and over again, is like the labour of Sisyphus. The
-burden of labour, like the rock, keeps ever falling back on the worn-out
-labourer.”104
-At the same time that factory work exhausts the nervous system to the uttermost, it does away
-with the many-sided play of the muscles, and confiscates every atom of freedom, both in bodily
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-and intellectual activity.105 The lightening of the labour, even, becomes a sort of torture, since the
-machine does not free the labourer from work, but deprives the work of all interest. Every kind of
-capitalist production, in so far as it is not only a labour-process, but also a process of creating
-surplus-value, has this in common, that it is not the workman that employs the instruments of
-labour, but the instruments of labour that employ the workman. But it is only in the factory
-system that this inversion for the first time acquires technical and palpable reality. By means of
-its conversion into an automaton, the instrument of labour confronts the labourer, during the
-labour-process, in the shape of capital, of dead labour, that dominates, and pumps dry, living
-labour-power. The separation of the intellectual powers of production from the manual labour,
-and the conversion of those powers into the might of capital over labour, is, as we have already
-shown, finally completed by modern industry erected on the foundation of machinery. The
-special skill of each individual insignificant factory operative vanishes as an infinitesimal
-quantity before the science, the gigantic physical forces, and the mass of labour that are embodied
-in the factory mechanism and, together with that mechanism, constitute the power of the
-“master.” This “master,” therefore, in whose brain the machinery and his monopoly of it are
-inseparably united, whenever he falls out with his “hands,” contemptuously tells them:
-“The factory operatives should keep in wholesome remembrance the fact that
-theirs is really a low species of skilled labour; and that there is none which is more
-easily acquired, or of its quality more amply remunerated, or which by a short
-training of the least expert can be more quickly, as well as abundantly, acquired....
-The master’s machinery really plays a far more important part in the business of
-production than the labour and the skill of the operative, which six months’
-education can teach, and a common labourer can learn.”106
-The technical subordination of the workman to the uniform motion of the instruments of labour,
-and the peculiar composition of the body of workpeople, consisting as it does of individuals of
-both sexes and of all ages, give rise to a barrack discipline, which is elaborated into a complete
-system in the factory, and which fully develops the before mentioned labour of overlooking,
-thereby dividing the workpeople into operatives and overlookers, into private soldiers and
-sergeants of an industrial army. “The main difficulty [in the automatic factory] ... lay ... above all
-in training human beings to renounce their desultory habits of work, and to identify themselves
-with the unvarying regularity of the complex automaton. To devise and administer a successful
-code of factory discipline, suited to the necessities of factory diligence, was the Herculean
-enterprise, the noble achievement of Arkwright! Even at the present day, when the system is
-perfectly organised and its labour lightened to the utmost, it is found nearly impossible to convert
-persons past the age of puberty, into useful factory hands.”107 The factory code in which capital
-formulates, like a private legislator, and at his own good will, his autocracy over his workpeople,
-unaccompanied by that division of responsibility, in other matters so much approved of by the
-bourgeoisie, and unaccompanied by the still more approved representative system, this code is
-but the capitalistic caricature of that social regulation of the labour-process which becomes
-requisite in co-operation on a great scale, and in the employment in common, of instruments of
-labour and especially of machinery. The place of the slave-driver’s lash is taken by the
-overlooker’s book of penalties. All punishments naturally resolve themselves into fines and
-deductions from wages, and the law-giving talent of the factory Lycurgus so arranges matters,
-that a violation of his laws is, if possible, more profitable to him than the keeping of them.108 We
-shall here merely allude to the material conditions under which factory labour is carried on. Every
-organ of sense is injured in an equal degree by artificial elevation of the temperature, by the dust-
-laden atmosphere, by the deafening noise, not to mention danger to life and limb among the
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-thickly crowded machinery, which, with the regularity of the seasons, issues its list of the killed
-and wounded in the industrial battle.109 Economy of the social means of production, matured and
-forced as in a hothouse by the factory system, is turned, in the hands of capital, into systematic
-robbery of what is necessary for the life of the workman while he is at work, robbery of space,
-light, air, and of protection to his person against the dangerous and unwholesome
-accompaniments of the productive process, not to mention the robbery of appliances for the
-comfort of the workman.110 Is Fourier wrong when he calls factories “tempered bagnos"?111
-Section 5: The Strife Between Workman and Machine
-The contest between the capitalist and the wage-labourer dates back to the very origin of capital.
-It raged on throughout the whole manufacturing period. 112 But only since the introduction of
-machinery has the workman fought against the instrument of labour itself, the material
-embodiment of capital. He revolts against this particular form of the means of production, as
-being the material basis of the capitalist mode of production.
-In the 17th century nearly all Europe experienced revolts of the workpeople against the ribbon-
-loom, a machine for weaving ribbons and trimmings, called in Germany Bandmühle,
-Schnurmühle, and Mühlenstuhl. These machines were invented in Germany. Abbé Lancellotti, in
-a work that appeared in Venice in 1636, but which was written in 1579, says as follows:
-“Anthony Müller of Danzig saw about 50 years ago in that town, a very ingenious
-machine, which weaves 4 to 6 pieces at once. But the Mayor being apprehensive
-that this invention might throw a large number of workmen on the streets, caused
-the inventor to be secretly strangled or drowned.”
-In Leyden, this machine was not used till 1629; there the riots of the ribbon-weavers at length
-compelled the Town Council to prohibit it.
-“In hac urbe,” says Boxhorn (Inst. Pol., 1663), referring to the introduction of this
-machine into Leyden, “ante hos viginti circiter annos instrumentum quidam
-invenerunt textorium, quo solus plus panni et facilius conficere poterat, quan
-plures aequali tempore. Hinc turbae ortae et querulae textorum, tandemque usus
-hujus instrumenti a magistratu prohibitus est.”
-[In this town, about twenty years ago certain people invented an instrument for
-weaving, with which a single person could weave more cloth, and more easily,
-than many others in the same length of time. As a result there arose disturbances
-and complaints from the weavers, until the Town Council finally prohibited the
-use of this instrument.]
-After making various decrees more or less prohibitive against this loom in 1632, 1639, &c., the
-States General of Holland at length permitted it to be used, under certain conditions, by the decree
-of the 15th December, 1661. It was also prohibited in Cologne in 1676, at the same time that its
-introduction into England was causing disturbances among the workpeople. By an imperial Edict
-of 19th Feb., 1685, its use was forbidden throughout all Germany. In Hamburg it was burnt in
-public by order of the Senate. The Emperor Charles VI., on 9th Feb., 1719, renewed the edict of
-1685, and not till 1765 was its use openly allowed in the Electorate of Saxony. This machine,
-which shook Europe to its foundations, was in fact the precursor of the mule and the power-loom,
-and of the industrial revolution of the 18th century. It enabled a totally inexperienced boy, to set
-the whole loom with all its shuttles in motion, by simply moving a rod backwards and forwards,
-and in its improved form produced from 40 to 50 pieces at once.
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-About 1630, a wind-sawmill, erected near London by a Dutchman, succumbed to the excesses of
-the populace. Even as late as the beginning of the 18th century, sawmills driven by water
-overcame the opposition of the people, supported as it was by Parliament, only with great
-difficulty. No sooner had Everet in 1758 erected the first wool-shearing machine that was driven
-by water-power, than it was set on fire by 100,000 people who had been thrown out of work.
-Fifty thousand workpeople, who had previously lived by carding wool, petitioned Parliament
-against Arkwright’s scribbling mills and carding engines. The enormous destruction of machinery
-that occurred in the English manufacturing districts during the first 15 years of this century,
-chiefly caused by the employment of the power-loom, and known as the Luddite movement, gave
-the anti-Jacobin governments of a Sidmouth, a Castlereagh, and the like, a pretext for the most
-reactionary and forcible measures. It took both time and experience before the workpeople learnt
-to distinguish between machinery and its employment by capital, and to direct their attacks, not
-against the material instruments of production, but against the mode in which they are used.113
-The contests about wages in Manufacture, pre-suppose manufacture, and are in no sense directed
-against its existence. The opposition against the establishment of new manufactures, proceeds
-from the guilds and privileged towns, not from the workpeople. Hence the writers of the
-manufacturing period treat the division of labour chiefly as a means of virtually supplying a
-deficiency of labourers, and not as a means of actually displacing those in work. This distinction
-is self-evident. If it be said that 100 millions of people would be required in England to spin with
-the old spinning-wheel the cotton that is now spun with mules by 500,000 people, this does not
-mean that the mules took the place of those millions who never existed. It means only this, that
-many millions of workpeople would be required to replace the spinning machinery. If, on the
-other hand, we say, that in England the power-loom threw 800,000 weavers on the streets, we do
-not refer to existing machinery, that would have to be replaced by a definite number of
-workpeople, but to a number of weavers in existence who were actually replaced or displaced by
-the looms. During the manufacturing period, handicraft labour, altered though it was by division
-of labour, was yet the basis. The demands of the new colonial markets could not be satisfied
-owing to the relatively small number of town operatives handed down from the middle ages, and
-the manufactures proper opened out new fields of production to the rural population, driven from
-the land by the dissolution of the feudal system. At that time, therefore, division of labour and co-
-operation in the workshops, were viewed more from the positive aspect, that they made the
-workpeople more productive.114 Long before the period of modern industry, co-operation and the
-concentration of the instruments of labour in the hands of a few, gave rise, in numerous countries
-where these methods were applied in agriculture, to great, sudden and forcible revolutions in the
-modes of production, and consequentially, in the conditions of existence, and the means of
-employment of the rural populations. But this contest at first takes place more between the large
-and the small landed proprietors, than between capital and wage labour; on the other hand, when
-the labourers are displaced by the instruments of labour, by sheep, horses, &c., in this case force
-is directly resorted to in the first instance as the prelude to the industrial revolution. The labourers
-are first driven from the land, and then come the sheep. Land grabbing on a great scale, such as
-was perpetrated in England, is the first step in creating a field for the establishment of agriculture
-on a great scale.115 Hence this subversion of agriculture puts on, at first, more the appearance of a
-political revolution.
-The instrument of labour, when it takes the form of a machine, immediately becomes a
-competitor of the workman himself.116 The self-expansion of capital by means of machinery is
-thenceforward directly proportional to the number of the workpeople, whose means of livelihood
-have been destroyed by that machinery. The whole system of capitalist production is based on the
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-fact that the workman sells his labour-power as a commodity. Division of labour specialises this
-labour-power, by reducing it to skill in handling a particular tool. So soon as the handling of this
-tool becomes the work of a machine, then, with the use-value, the exchange-value too, of the
-workman’s labour-power vanishes; the workman becomes unsaleable, like paper money thrown
-out of currency by legal enactment. That portion of the working-class, thus by machinery
-rendered superfluous, i.e., no longer immediately necessary for the self-expansion of capital,
-either goes to the wall in the unequal contest of the old handicrafts and manufactures with
-machinery, or else floods all the more easily accessible branches of industry, swamps the labour-
-market, and sinks the price of labour-power below its value. It is impressed upon the workpeople,
-as a great consolation, first, that their sufferings are only temporary (“a temporary
-inconvenience"), secondly, that machinery acquires the mastery over the whole of a given field of
-production, only by degrees, so that the extent and intensity of its destructive effect is diminished.
-The first consolation neutralises the second. When machinery seizes on an industry by degrees, it
-produces chronic misery among the operatives who compete with it. Where the transition is rapid,
-the effect is acute and felt by great masses. History discloses no tragedy more horrible than the
-gradual extinction of the English hand-loom weavers, an extinction that was spread over several
-decades, and finally sealed in 1838. Many of them died of starvation, many with families
-vegetated for a long time on 2½ d. a day.117 On the other hand, the English cotton machinery
-produced an acute effect in India. The Governor General reported 1834-35:
-“The misery hardly finds a parallel in the history of commerce. The bones of the
-cotton-weavers are bleaching the plains of India.”
-No doubt, in turning them out of this “temporal” world, the machinery caused them no more than
-“a temporary inconvenience.” For the rest, since machinery is continually seizing upon new fields
-of production, its temporary effect is really permanent. Hence, the character of independence and
-estrangement which the capitalist mode of production as a whole gives to the instruments of
-labour and to the product, as against the workman, is developed by means of machinery into a
-thorough antagonism.118 Therefore, it is with the advent of machinery, that the workman for the
-first time brutally revolts against the instruments of labour.
-The instrument of labour strikes down the labourer. This direct antagonism between the two
-comes out most strongly, whenever newly introduced machinery competes with handicrafts or
-manufactures, handed down from former times. But even in modern industry the continual
-improvement of machinery, and the development of the automatic system, has an analogous
-effect.
-“The object of improved machinery is to diminish manual labour, to provide for
-the performance of a process or the completion of a link in a manufacture by the
-aid of an iron instead of the human apparatus.” 119“The adaptation of power to
-machinery heretofore moved by hand, is almost of daily occurrence ... the minor
-improvements in machinery having for their object economy of power, the
-production of better work, the turning off more work in the same time, or in
-supplying the place of a child, a female, or a man, are constant, and although
-sometimes apparently of no great moment, have somewhat important results.”120
-“Whenever a process requires peculiar dexterity and steadiness of hand, it is
-withdrawn, as soon as possible, from the cunning workman, who is prone to
-irregularities of many kinds, and it is placed in charge of a peculiar mechanism, so
-self-regulating that a child can superintend it.” 121“On the automatic plan skilled
-labour gets progressively superseded.” 122“The effect of improvements in
-machinery, not merely in superseding the necessity for the employment of the
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-same quantity of adult labour as before, in order to produce a given result, but in
-substituting one description of human labour for another, the less skilled for the
-more skilled, juvenile for adult, female for male, causes a fresh disturbance in the
-rate of wages.”123 “The effect of substituting the self-acting mule for the common
-mule, is to discharge the greater part of the men spinners, and to retain adolescents
-and children.”124
-The extraordinary power of expansion of the factory system owing to accumulated practical
-experience, to the mechanical means at hand, and to constant technical progress, was proved to us
-by the giant strides of that system under the pressure of a shortened working day. But who, in
-1860, the Zenith year of the English cotton industry, would have dreamt of the galloping
-improvements in machinery, and the corresponding displacement of working people, called into
-being during the following 3 years, under the stimulus of the American Civil War? A couple of
-examples from the Reports of the Inspectors of Factories will suffice on this point. A Manchester
-manufacturer states:
-“We formerly had 75 carding engines, now we have 12, doing the same quantity
-of work.... We are doing with fewer hands by 14, at a saving in wages of £10 a-
-week. Our estimated saving in waste is about 10% in the quantity of cotton
-consumed.” “In another fine-spinning mill in Manchester, I was informed that
-through increased speed and the adoption of some self-acting processes, a
-reduction had been made, in number, of a fourth in one department, and of above
-half in another, and that the introduction of the combing machine in place of the
-second carding, had considerably reduced, the number of hands formerly
-employed in the carding-room.”
-Another spinning-mill is estimated to effect a saving of labour of 10%. The Messrs. Gilmour,
-spinners at Manchester, state: “In our blowing-room department we consider our expense with
-new machinery is fully one-third less in wages and hands ... in the jack-frame and drawing-frame
-room, about one-third less in expense, and likewise one-third less in hands; in the spinning room
-about one-third less in expenses. But this is not all; when our yarn goes to the manufacturers, it is
-so much better by the application of our new machinery, that they will produce a greater quantity
-of cloth, and cheaper than from the yarn produced by old machinery.”125 Mr. Redgrave further
-remarks in the same Report:
-“The reduction of hands against increased production is, in fact, constantly taking
-place, in woollen mills the reduction commenced some time since, and is
-continuing; a few days since, the master of a school in the neighbourhood of
-Rochdale said to me, that the great falling off in the girls’ school is not only
-caused by the distress, but by the changes of machinery in the woollen mills, in
-consequence of which a reduction of 70 short-timers had taken place.” 126
-The following table shows the total result of the mechanical improvements in the English cotton
-industry due to the American Civil War.
-Number of Factories 1857 1861 1868
-England and Wales 2,046 2,715 2,405
-Scotland 152 163 131
-Ireland 12 9 13
-United Kingdom 2,210 2,887 2,549
-Number of Power Looms 1857 1861 1868
-England and Wales 275,590 368,125 344,719
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-Scotland 21,624 30,110 31,864
-Ireland 1,633 1,757 2,746
-United Kingdom 298,847 399,992 379,329
-Number of Spindles 1857 1861 1868
-England and Wales 25,818,576 28,352,125 30,478,228
-Scotland 2,041,129 1,915,398 1,397,546
-Ireland 150,512 119,944 124,240
-United Kingdom 28,010,217 30,387,467 32,000,014
-Number of Persons
-Employed 1857 1861 1868
-England and Wales 341,170 407,598 357,052
-Scotland 34,698 41,237 39,809
-Ireland 3,345 2,734 4,203
-United Kingdom 379,213 452,569 401,064
-Hence, between 1861 and 1868, 338 cotton factories disappeared, in other words more productive
-machinery on a larger scale was concentrated in the hands of a smaller number of capitalists. The
-number of power-looms decreased by 20,663; but since their product increased in the same
-period, an improved loom must have yielded more than an old one. Lastly the number of spindles
-increased by 1,612,541, while the number of operatives decreased by 50,505. The “temporary”
-misery inflicted on the workpeople by the cotton-crisis, was heightened, and from being
-temporary made permanent, by the rapid and persistent progress of machinery.
-But machinery not only acts as a competitor who gets the better of the workman, and is constantly
-on the point of making him superfluous. It is also a power inimical to him, and as such capital
-proclaims it from the roof tops and as such makes use of it. It is the most powerful weapon for
-repressing strikes, those periodical revolts of the working-class against the autocracy of capital.127
-According to Gaskell, the steam-engine was from the very first an antagonist of human power, an
-antagonist that enabled the capitalist to tread under foot the growing claims of the workmen, who
-threatened the newly born factory system with a crisis.128 It would be possible to write quite a
-history of the inventions, made since 1830, for the sole purpose of supplying capital with
-weapons against the revolts of the working-class. At the head of these in importance, stands the
-self-acting mule, because it opened up a new epoch in the automatic system.129
-Nasmyth, the inventor of the steam-hammer, gives the following evidence before the Trades’
-Union Commission, with regard to the improvements made by him in machinery and introduced
-in consequence of the wide-spread and long strikes of the engineers in 1851.
-“The characteristic feature of our modern mechanical improvements, is the
-introduction of self-acting tool machinery. What every mechanical workman has
-now to do, and what every boy can do, is not to work himself but to superintend
-the beautiful labour of the machine. The whole class of workmen that depend
-exclusively on their skill, is now done away with. Formerly, I employed four boys
-to every mechanic. Thanks to these new mechanical combinations, I have reduced
-the number of grown-up men from 1,500 to 750. The result was a considerable
-increase in my profits.”
-Ure says of a machine used in calico printing:
-“At length capitalists sought deliverance from this intolerable bondage” [namely
-the, in their eyes, burdensome terms of their contracts with the workmen] “in the
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-resources of science, and were speedily re-instated in their legitimate rule, that of
-the head over the inferior members.”
-Speaking of an invention for dressing warps:
-“Then the combined malcontents, who fancied themselves impregnably
-entrenched behind the old lines of division of labour, found their flanks turned and
-their defences rendered useless by the new mechanical tactics, and were obliged to
-surrender at discretion.”
-With regard to the invention of the self-acting mule, he says:
-“A creation destined to restore order among the industrious classes.... This
-invention confirms the great doctrine already propounded, that when capital
-enlists science into her service, the refractory hand of labour will always be taught
-docility.”130
-Although Ure’s work appeared 30 years ago, at a time when the factory system was
-comparatively but little developed, it still perfectly expresses the spirit of the factory, not only by
-its undisguised cynicism, but also by the naïveté with which it blurts out the stupid contradictions
-of the capitalist brain. For instance, after propounding the “doctrine” stated above, that capital,
-with the aid of science taken into its pay, always reduces the refractory hand of labour to docility,
-he grows indignant because
-“it (physico-mechanical science) has been accused of lending itself to the rich
-capitalist as an instrument for harassing the poor.”
-After preaching a long sermon to show how advantageous the rapid development of machinery is
-to the working-classes, he warns them, that by their obstinacy and their strikes they hasten that
-development.
-“Violent revulsions of this nature,” he says, “display short-sighted man in the
-contemptible character of a self-tormentor.”
-A few pages before he states the contrary.
-“Had it not been for the violent collisions and interruptions resulting from
-erroneous views among the factory operatives, the factory system would have
-been developed still more rapidly and beneficially for all concerned.” Then he
-exclaims again: “Fortunately for the state of society in the cotton districts of Great
-Britain, the improvements in machinery are gradual.” “It” (improvement in
-machinery) “is said to lower the rate of earnings of adults by displacing a portion
-of them, and thus rendering their number superabundant as compared with the
-demand for their labour. It certainly augments the demand for the labour of
-children and increases the rate of their wages.”
-On the other hand, this same dispenser of consolation defends the lowness of the children’s wages
-on the ground that it prevents parents from sending their children at too early an age into the
-factory. The whole of his book is a vindication of a working day of unrestricted length; that
-Parliament should forbid children of 13 years to be exhausted by working 12 hours a day,
-reminds his liberal soul of the darkest days of the Middle Ages. This does not prevent him from
-calling upon the factory operatives to thank Providence, who by means of machinery has given
-them the leisure to think of their “immortal interests.”131
-292 Chapter 15
-Section 6: The Theory of Compensation as Regards the
-Workpeople Displaced by Machinery
-James Mill, MacCulloch, Torrens, Senior, John Stuart Mill, and a whole series besides, of
-bourgeois political economists, insist that all machinery that displaces workmen, simultaneously
-and necessarily sets free an amount of capital adequate to employ the same identical workmen. 132
-Suppose a capitalist to employ 100 workmen, at £30 a year each, in a carpet factory. The variable
-capital annually laid out amounts, therefore, to £3,000. Suppose, also, that he discharges 50 of his
-workmen, and employs the remaining 50 with machinery that costs him £1,500. To simplify
-matters, we take no account of buildings, coal, &c. Further suppose that the raw material annually
-consumed costs £3,000, both before and after the change.133 Is any capital set free by this
-metamorphosis? Before the change, the total sum of £6,000 consisted half of constant, and half of
-variable capital. After the change it consists of £4,500 constant ( £3,000 raw material and £1,500
-machinery), and £1,500 variable capital. The variable capital, instead of being one half, is only
-one quarter, of the total capital. Instead of being set free, a part of the capital is here locked up in
-such a way as to cease to be exchanged against labour-power: variable has been changed into
-constant capital. Other things remaining unchanged, the capital of £6,000, can, in future, employ
-no more than 50 men. With each improvement in the machinery, it will employ fewer. If the
-newly introduced machinery had cost less than did the labour-power and implements displaced by
-it, if, for instance, instead of costing £1,500, it had cost only £1,000, a variable capital of £1,000
-would have been converted into constant capital, and locked up; and a capital of £500 would have
-been set free. The latter sum, supposing wages unchanged, would form a fund sufficient to
-employ about 16 out of the 50 men discharged; nay, less than 16, for, in order to be employed as
-capital, a part of this £500 must now become constant capital, thus leaving only the remainder to
-be laid out in labour-power.
-But, suppose, besides, that the making of the new machinery affords employment to a greater
-number of mechanics, can that be called compensation to the carpet-makers, thrown on the
-streets? At the best, its construction employs fewer men than its employment displaces. The sum
-of £1,500 that formerly represented the wages of the discharged carpet-makers, now represents in
-the shape of machinery: (1) the value of the means of production used in the construction of that
-machinery, (2) the wages of the mechanics employed in its construction, and (3) the surplus-value
-falling to the share of their “master.” Further, the machinery need not be renewed till it is worn
-out. Hence, in order to keep the increased number of mechanics in constant employment, one
-carpet manufacturer after another must displace workmen by machines.
-As a matter of fact the apologists do not mean this sort of setting free.
-They have in their minds the means of subsistence of the liberated work-people. It cannot be
-denied, in the above instance, that the machinery not only liberates 50 men, thus placing them at
-others’ disposal, but, at the same time, it withdraws from their consumption, and sets free, means
-of subsistence to the value of £1,500. The simple fact, by no means a new one, that machinery
-cuts off the workmen from their means of subsistence is, therefore, in economic parlance
-tantamount to this, that machinery liberates means of subsistence for the workman, or converts
-those means into capital for his employment. The mode of expression, you see, is everything.
-Nominibus mollire licet mala.
-This theory implies that the £1,500 worth of means of subsistence was capital that was being
-expanded by the labour of the 50 men discharged. That, consequently, this capital falls out of
-employment so soon as they commence their forced holidays, and never rests till it has found a
-fresh investment, where it can again be productively consumed by these same 50 men. That
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-sooner or later, therefore, the capital and the workmen must come together again, and that, then,
-the compensation is complete. That the sufferings of the workmen displaced by machinery are
-therefore as transient as are the riches of this world.
-In relation to the discharged workmen, the £1,500 worth of means of subsistence never was
-capital. What really confronted them as capital, was the sum of £1,500, afterwards laid out in
-machinery. On looking closer it will be seen that this sum represented part of the carpets
-produced in a year by the 50 discharged men, which part they received as wages from their
-employer in money instead of in kind. With the carpets in the form of money, they bought means
-of subsistence to the value of £1,500. These means, therefore, were to them, not capital, but
-commodities, and they, as regards these commodities, were not wage-labourers, but buyers. The
-circumstance that they were “freed” by the machinery, from the means of purchase, changed them
-from buyers into non-buyers. Hence a lessened demand for those commodities – voilà tout. If this
-diminution be not compensated by an increase from some other quarter, the market price of the
-commodities falls. If this state of things lasts for some time, and extends, there follows a
-discharge of workmen employed in the production of these commodities. Some of the capital that
-was previously devoted to production of necessary means of subsistence, has to become
-reproduced in another form. While prices fall, and capital is being displaced, the labourers
-employed in the production of necessary means of subsistence are in their turn “freed” from a part
-of their wages. Instead, therefore, of proving that, when machinery frees the workman from his
-means of subsistence, it simultaneously converts those means into capital for his further
-employment, our apologists, with their cut-and-dried law of supply and demand, prove, on the
-contrary, that machinery throws workmen on the streets, not only in that branch of production in
-which it is introduced, but also in those branches in which it is not introduced.
-The real facts, which are travestied by the optimism of economists, are as follows: The labourers,
-when driven out of the workshop by the machinery, are thrown upon the labour market, and there
-add to the number of workmen at the disposal of the capitalists. In Part VII of this book it will be
-seen that this effect of machinery, which, as we have seen, is represented to be a compensation to
-the working class, is on the contrary a most frightful scourge. For the present I will only say this:
-The labourers that are thrown out of work in any branch of industry, can no doubt seek for
-employment in some other branch. If they find it, and thus renew the bond between them and the
-means of subsistence, this takes place only by the intermediary of a new and additional capital
-that is seeking investment; not at all by the intermediary of the capital that formerly employed
-them and was afterwards converted into machinery. And even should they find employment, what
-a poor look-out is theirs! Crippled as they are by division of labour, these poor devils are worth so
-little outside their old trade, that they cannot find admission into any industries, except a few of
-inferior kind, that are over-supplied with underpaid workmen.134 Further, every branch of
-industry attracts each year a new stream of men, who furnish a contingent from which to fill up
-vacancies, and to draw a supply for expansion. So soon as machinery sets free a part of the
-workmen employed in a given branch of industry, the reserve men are also diverted into new
-channels of employment, and become absorbed in other branches; meanwhile the original
-victims, during the period of transition, for the most part starve and perish.
-It is an undoubted fact that machinery, as such, is not responsible for “setting free” the workman
-from the means of subsistence. It cheapens and increases production in that branch which it seizes
-on, and at first makes no change in the mass of the means of subsistence produced in other
-branches. Hence, after its introduction, the society possesses as much, if not more, of the
-necessaries of life than before, for the labourers thrown out of work; and that quite apart from the
-enormous share of the annual produce wasted by the non-workers. And this is the point relied on
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-by our apologists! The contradictions and antagonisms inseparable from the capitalist
-employment of machinery, do not exist, they say, since they do not arise out of machinery, as
-such, but out of its capitalist employment! Since therefore machinery, considered alone, shortens
-the hours of labour, but, when in the service of capital, lengthens them; since in itself it lightens
-labour, but when employed by capital, heightens the intensity of labour; since in itself it is a
-victory of man over the forces of Nature, but in the hands of capital, makes man the slave of those
-forces; since in itself it increases the wealth of the producers, but in the hands of capital, makes
-them paupers ‒ for all these reasons and others besides, says the bourgeois economist without
-more ado, it is clear as noon-day that all these contradictions are a mere semblance of the reality,
-and that, as a matter of fact, they have neither an actual nor a theoretical existence. Thus he saves
-himself from all further puzzling of the brain, and what is more, implicitly declares his opponent
-to be stupid enough to contend against, not the capitalistic employment of machinery, but
-machinery itself.
-No doubt he is far from denying that temporary inconvenience may result from the capitalist use
-of machinery. But where is the medal without its reverse! Any employment of machinery, except
-by capital, is to him an impossibility. Exploitation of the workman by the machine is therefore,
-with him, identical with exploitation of the machine by the workman. Whoever, therefore,
-exposes the real state of things in the capitalistic employment of machinery, is against its
-employment in any way, and is an enemy of social progress!135 Exactly the reasoning of the
-celebrated Bill Sykes. “Gentlemen of the jury, no doubt the throat of this commercial traveller has
-been cut. But that is not my fault, it is the fault of the knife. Must we, for such a temporary
-inconvenience, abolish the use of the knife? Only consider! where would agriculture and trade be
-without the knife? Is it not as salutary in surgery, as it is knowing in anatomy? And in addition a
-willing help at the festive board? If you abolish the knife – you hurl us back into the depths of
-barbarism.”136
-Although machinery necessarily throws men out of work in those industries into which it is
-introduced, yet it may, notwithstanding this, bring about an increase of employment in other
-industries. This effect, however, has nothing in common with the so-called theory of
-compensation. Since every article produced by a machine is cheaper than a similar article
-produced by hand, we deduce the following infallible law: If the total quantity of the article
-produced by machinery, be equal to the total quantity of the article previously produced by a
-handicraft or by manufacture, and now made by machinery, then the total labour expended is
-diminished. The new labour spent on the instruments of labour, on the machinery, on the coal,
-and so on, must necessarily be less than the labour displaced by the use of the machinery;
-otherwise the product of the machine would be as dear, or dearer, than the product of the manual
-labour. But, as a matter of fact, the total quantity of the article produced by machinery with a
-diminished number of workmen, instead of remaining equal to, by far exceeds the total quantity
-of the hand-made article that has been displaced. Suppose that 400,000 yards of cloth have been
-produced on power-looms by fewer weavers than could weave 100,000 yards by hand. In the
-quadrupled product there lies four times as much raw material. Hence the production of raw
-material must be quadrupled. But as regards the instruments of labour, such as buildings, coal,
-machinery, and so on, it is different; the limit up to which the additional labour required for their
-production can increase, varies with the difference between the quantity of the machine-made
-article, and the quantity of the same article that the same number of workmen could make by
-hand.
-Hence, as the use of machinery extends in a given industry, the immediate effect is to increase
-production in the other industries that furnish the first with means of production. How far
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-employment is thereby found for an increased number of men, depends, given the length of the
-working day and the intensity of labour, on the composition of the capital employed, i.e., on the
-ratio of its constant to its variable component. This ratio, in its turn, varies considerably with the
-extent to which machinery has already seized on, or is then seizing on, those trades. The number
-of the men condemned to work in coal and metal mines increased enormously owing to the
-progress of the English factory system; but during the last few decades this increase of number
-has been less rapid, owing to the use of new machinery in mining.137 A new type of workman
-springs into life along with the machine, namely, its maker. We have already learnt that
-machinery has possessed itself even of this branch of production on a scale that grows greater
-every day.138 As to raw material,139 there is not the least doubt that the rapid strides of cotton
-spinning, not only pushed on with tropical luxuriance the growth of cotton in the United States,
-and with it the African slave trade, but also made the breeding of slaves the chief business of the
-border slave-states. When, in 1790, the first census of slaves was taken in the United States, their
-number was 697,000; in 1861 it had nearly reached four millions. On the other hand, it is no less
-certain that the rise of the English woollen factories, together with the gradual conversion of
-arable land into sheep pasture, brought, about the superfluity of agricultural labourers that led to
-their being driven in masses into the towns. Ireland, having during the last twenty years reduced
-its population by nearly one half, is at this moment undergoing the process of still further
-reducing the number of its inhabitants, so as exactly to suit the requirements of its landlords and
-of the English woollen manufacturers.
-When machinery is applied to any of the preliminary or intermediate stages through which the
-subject of labour has to pass on its way to completion, there is an increased yield of material in
-those stages, and simultaneously an increased demand for labour in the handicrafts or
-manufactures supplied by the produce of the machines. Spinning by machinery, for example,
-supplied yarn so cheaply and so abundantly that the hand-loom weavers were, at first, able to
-work full time without increased outlay. Their earnings accordingly rose.140 Hence a flow of
-people into the cotton-weaving trade, till at length the 800,000 weavers, called into existence by
-the Jenny, the throstle and the mule, were overwhelmed by the power-loom. So also, owing to the
-abundance of clothing materials produced by machinery, the number of tailors, seamstresses and
-needlewomen, went on increasing until the appearance of the sewing-machine.
-In proportion as machinery, with the aid of a relatively small number of workpeople, increases
-the mass of raw materials, intermediate products, instruments of labour, &c., the working-up of
-these raw materials and intermediate products becomes split up into numberless branches; social
-production increases in diversity. The factory system carries the social division of labour
-immeasurably further than does manufacture, for it increases the productiveness of the industries
-it seizes upon, in a far higher degree.
-The immediate result of machinery is to augment surplus-value and the mass of products in which
-surplus-value is embodied. And, as the substances consumed by the capitalists and their
-dependents become more plentiful, so too do these orders of society. Their growing wealth, and
-the relatively diminished number of workmen required to produce the necessaries of life beget,
-simultaneously with the rise of new and luxurious wants, the means of satisfying those wants. A
-larger portion of the produce of society is changed into surplus-produce, and a larger part of the
-surplus-produce is supplied for consumption in a multiplicity of refined shapes. In other words,
-the production of luxuries increases.141 The refined and varied forms of the products are also due
-to new relations with the markets of the world, relations that are created by modern industry. Not
-only are greater quantities of foreign articles of luxury exchanged for home products, but a
-greater mass of foreign raw materials, ingredients, and intermediate products, are used as means
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-of production in the home industries. Owing to these relations with the markets of the world, the
-demand for labour increases in the carrying trades, which split up into numerous varieties.142
-The increase of the means of production and subsistence, accompanied by a relative diminution in
-the number of labourers, causes an increased demand for labour in making canals, docks, tunnels,
-bridges, and so on, works that can only bear fruit in the far future. Entirely new branches of
-production, creating new fields of labour, are also formed, as the direct result either of machinery
-or of the general industrial changes brought about by it. But the place occupied by these branches
-in the general production is, even in the most developed countries, far from important. The
-number of labourers that find employment in them is directly proportional to the demand, created
-by those industries, for the crudest form of manual labour. The chief industries of this kind are, at
-present, gas-works, telegraphs, photography, steam navigation, and railways. According to the
-census of 1861 for England and Wales, we find in the gas industry (gas-works, production of
-mechanical apparatus, servants of the gas companies, &c), 15,211 persons; in telegraphy, 2,399;
-in photography, 2,366; steam navigation, 3,570; and in railways, 70,599, of whom the unskilled
-“navvies,” more or less permanently employed, and the whole administrative and commercial
-staff, make up about 28,000. The total number of persons, therefore, employed in these five new
-industries amounts to 94,145.
-Lastly, the extraordinary productiveness of modern industry, accompanied as it is by both a more
-extensive and a more intense exploitation of labour-power in all other spheres of production,
-allows of the unproductive employment of a larger and larger part of the working-class, and the
-consequent reproduction, on a constantly extending scale, of the ancient domestic slaves under
-the name of a servant class, including men-servants, women-servants, lackeys, &c. According to
-the census of 1861, the population of England and Wales was 20,066,244; of these, 9,776,259
-males, and 10,289,965 females. If we deduct from this population all who are too old or too
-young for work, all unproductive women, young persons and children, the “ideological” classes,
-such as government officials, priests, lawyers, soldiers, &c.; further, all who have no occupation
-but to consume the labour of others in the form of rent, interest, &c.; and, lastly, paupers,
-vagabonds, and criminals, there remain in round numbers eight millions of the two sexes of every
-age, including in that number every capitalist who is in any way engaged in industry, commerce,
-or finance. Among these 8 millions are:
-PERSONS
-Agricultural labourers (including
-shepherds, farm servants, and
-maidservants living in the houses of
-farmers)
-1,098,261
-All who are employed in cotton, woollen,
-worsted, flax, hemp, silk, and jute
-factories, in stocking making and lace
-making by machinery
-143642,607
-All who are employed in coal mines and
-metal mines
-565,835
-All who are employed in metal works
-(blastfurnaces, rolling mills, &c.), and
-metal manufactures of every kind
-144 396,998
-297 Chapter 15
-The servant class 1451,208,648
-All the persons employed in textile factories and in mines, taken together, number 1,208,442;
-those employed in textile factories and metal industries, taken together, number 1,039,605; in
-both cases less than the number of modern domestic slaves. What a splendid result of the
-capitalist exploitation of machinery!
-Section 7: Repulsion and Attraction of Workpeople by the
-Factory System. Crises in the Cotton Trade
-All political economists of any standing admit that the introduction of new machinery has a
-baneful effect on the workmen in the old handicrafts and manufactures with which this machinery
-at first competes. Almost all of them bemoan the slavery of the factory operative. And what is the
-great trump-card that they play? That machinery, after the horrors of the period of introduction
-and development have subsided, instead of diminishing, in the long run increases the number of
-the slaves of labour! Yes, Political Economy revels in the hideous theory, hideous to every
-“philanthropist” who believes in the eternal Nature-ordained necessity for capitalist production,
-that after a period of growth and transition, even its crowning success, the factory system based
-on machinery, grinds down more workpeople than on its first introduction it throws on the
-streets.146
-It is true that in some cases, as we saw from instances of English worsted and silk factories, an
-extraordinary extension of the factory system may, at a certain stage of its development, be
-accompanied not only by a relative, but by an absolute decrease in the number of operatives
-employed. In the year 1860, when a special census of all the factories in the United Kingdom was
-taken by order of Parliament, the factories in those parts of Lancashire, Cheshire, and Yorkshire,
-included in the district of Mr. Baker, the factory inspector, numbered 652; 570 of these contained
-85,622 power-looms, 6,819,146 spindles (exclusive of doubling spindles), employed 27,439
-horse-power (steam), and 1,390 (water), and 94,119 persons. In the year 1865, the same factories
-contained, looms 95,163, spindles 7,025,031, had a steam-power of 28,925 horses, and a water-
-power of 1,445 horses, and employed 88,913 persons. Between 1860 and 1865, therefore, the
-increase in looms was 11%, in spindles 3%, and in engine-power 3%, while the number of
-persons employed decreased 5½%.147 Between 1852 and 1862, considerable extension of the
-English woollen manufacture took place, while the number of hands employed in it remained
-almost stationary,
-“showing how greatly the introduction of new machines had superseded the
-labour of preceding periods.”148
-In certain cases, the increase in the number of hands employed is only apparent; that is, it is not
-due to the extension of the factories already established, but to the gradual annexation of
-connected trades; for instance, the increase in power-looms, and in the hands employed by them
-between 1838 and 1856, was, in the cotton trade, simply owing to the extension of this branch of
-industry; but in the other trades to the application of steam-power to the carpet-loom, to the
-ribbon-loom, and to the linen-loom, which previously had been worked by the power of men.149
-Hence the increase of the hands in these latter trades was merely a symptom of a diminution in
-the total number employed. Finally, we have considered this question entirely apart from the fact,
-that everywhere, except in the metal industries, young persons (under 18), and women and
-children form the preponderating element in the class of factory hands.
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-Nevertheless, in spite of the mass of hands actually displaced and virtually replaced by
-machinery, we can understand how the factory operatives, through the building of more mills and
-the extension of old ones in a given industry, may become more numerous than the
-manufacturing workmen and handicraftsman that have been displaced. Suppose, for example, that
-in the old mode of production, a capital of £500 is employed weekly, two-fifths being constant
-and three-fifths variable capital, i.e., £200 being laid out in means of production, and £300, say £1
-per man, in labour-power. On the introduction of machinery the composition of this capital
-becomes altered. We will suppose it to consist of four-fifths constant and one-fifth variable,
-which means that only £100 is now laid out in labour-power. Consequently, two-thirds of the
-workmen are discharged. If now the business extends, and the total capital employed grows to
-£1,500 under unchanged conditions, the number of operatives employed will increase to 300, just
-as many as before the introduction of the machinery. If the capital further grows to £2,000, 400
-men will be employed, or one-third more than under the old system. Their numbers have, in point
-of fact, increased by 100, but relatively, i.e., in proportion to the total capital advanced, they have
-diminished by 800, for the £2,000 capital would, in the old state of things, have employed 1,200
-instead of 400 men. Hence, a relative decrease in the number of hands is consistent with an actual
-increase. We assumed above that while the total capital increases, its composition remains the
-same, because the conditions of production remain constant. But we have already seen that, with
-every advance in the use of machinery, the constant component of capital, that part which
-consists of machinery, raw material, &c., increases, while the variable component, the part laid
-out in labour-power, decreases. We also know that in no other system of production is
-improvement so continuous, and the composition of the capital employed so constantly changing
-as in the factory system. These changes are, however, continually interrupted by periods of rest,
-during which there is a mere quantitative extension of the factories on the existing technical basis.
-During such periods the operatives increase in number. Thus, in 1835, the total number of
-operatives in the cotton, woollen, worsted, flax, and silk factories of the United Kingdom was
-only 354,684; while in 1861 the number of the power-loom weavers alone (of both sexes and of
-all ages, from eight years upwards), amounted to 230,654. Certainly, this growth appears less
-important when we consider that in 1838 the hand-loom weavers with their families still
-numbered 800,000,150 not to mention those thrown out of work in Asia, and on the Continent of
-Europe.
-In the few remarks I have still to make on this point, I shall refer to some actually existing
-relations, the existence of which our theoretical investigation has not yet disclosed.
-So long as, in a given branch of industry, the factory system extends itself at the expense of the
-old handicrafts or of manufacture, the result is as sure as is the result of an encounter between an
-army furnished with breach-loaders, and one armed with bows and arrows. This first period,
-during which machinery conquers its field of action, is of decisive importance owing to the
-extraordinary profits that it helps to produce. These profits not only form a source of accelerated
-accumulation, but also attract into the favoured sphere of production a large part of the additional
-social capital that is being constantly created, and is ever on the look-out for new investments.
-The special advantages of this first period of fast and furious activity are felt in every branch of
-production that machinery invades. So soon, however, as the factory system has gained a certain
-breadth of footing and a definite degree of maturity, and, especially, so soon as its technical basis,
-machinery, is itself produced by machinery; so soon as coal mining and iron mining, the metal
-industries, and the means of transport have been revolutionised; so soon, in short, as the general
-conditions requisite for production by the modern industrial system have been established, this
-mode of production acquires an elasticity, a capacity for sudden extension by leaps and bounds
-299 Chapter 15
-that finds no hindrance except in the supply of raw material and in the disposal of the produce.
-On the one hand, the immediate effect of machinery is to increase the supply of raw material in
-the same way, for example, as the cotton gin augmented the production of cotton.151 On the other
-hand, the cheapness of the articles produced by machinery, and the improved means of transport
-and communication furnish the weapons for conquering foreign markets. By ruining handicraft
-production in other countries, machinery forcibly converts them into fields for the supply of its
-raw material. In this way East India was compelled to produce cotton, wool, hemp, jute, and
-indigo for Great Britain.152 By constantly making a part of the hands “supernumerary,” modern
-industry, in all countries where it has taken root, gives a spur to emigration and to the
-colonisation of foreign lands, which are thereby converted into settlements for growing the raw
-material of the mother country; just as Australia, for example, was converted into a colony for
-growing wool.153 A new and international division of labour, a division suited to the requirements
-of the chief centres of modern industry springs up, and converts one part of the globe into a
-chiefly agricultural field of production, for supplying the other part which remains a chiefly
-industrial field. This revolution hangs together with radical changes in agriculture which we need
-not here further inquire into.154
-On the motion of Mr. Gladstone, the House of Commons ordered, on the 17th February, 1867, a
-return of the total quantities of grain, corn, and flour, of all sorts, imported into, and exported
-from, the United Kingdom, between the years 1831 and 1866. I give below a summary of the
-result. The flour is given in quarters of corn. (See the Table on p. 426.)
-QUINQUENNIAL PERIODS AND THE YEAR 1866
-ANNUAL
-AVERAGE
-1831-1835 1836-1840 1841-1845 1846-1850 1851-1855 1856-1860 1861-1865 1866
-Import 1,096,373 2,389,729 2,843,865 8,776,552 8,345,237 10,913,612 15,009,871 16,457,340
-Export 225,263 251,770 139,056 155,461 307,491 341,150 302,754 216,218
-Excess of
-import over
-export
-871,110 2,137,959 2,704,809 8,621,091 8,037,746 10,572,462 14,707,117 16,241,122
-POPULATION
-Yearly
-average in
-each period
-24,621,107 25,929,507 27,262,569 27,797,598 27,572,923 28,391,544 29,381,460 29,935,404
-Average
-quantity of
-corn etc,. in
-qrs.,
-consumed
-annually per
-head over
-and above
-the home
-produce
-consumed
-0.036 0.082 0.099 0.310 0.291 0.372 0.501 0.543
-300 Chapter 15
-The enormous power, inherent in the factory system, of expanding by jumps, and the dependence
-of that system on the markets of the world, necessarily beget feverish production, followed by
-over-filling of the markets, whereupon contraction of the markets brings on crippling of
-production. The life of modern industry becomes a series of periods of moderate activity,
-prosperity, over-production, crisis and stagnation. The uncertainty and instability to which
-machinery subjects the employment, and consequently the conditions of existence, of the
-operatives become normal, owing to these periodic changes of the industrial cycle. Except in the
-periods of prosperity, there rages between the capitalists the most furious combat for the share of
-each in the markets. This share is directly proportional to the cheapness of the product. Besides
-the rivalry that this struggle begets in the application of improved machinery for replacing labour-
-power, and of new methods of production, there also comes a time in every industrial cycle, when
-a forcible reduction of wages beneath the value of labour-power, is attempted for the purpose of
-cheapening commodities.155
-A necessary condition, therefore, to the growth of the number of factory hands, is a proportionally
-much more rapid growth of the amount of capital invested in mills. This growth, however, is
-conditioned by the ebb and flow of the industrial cycle. It is, besides, constantly interrupted by
-the technical progress that at one time virtually supplies the place of new workmen, at another,
-actually displaces old ones. This qualitative change in mechanical industry continually discharges
-hands from the factory, or shuts its doors against the fresh stream of recruits, while the purely
-quantitative extension of the factories absorbs not only the men thrown out of work, but also fresh
-contingents. The workpeople are thus continually both repelled and attracted, hustled from pillar
-to post, while, at the same time, constant changes take place in the sex, age, and skill of the
-levies.
-The lot of the factory operatives will be best depicted by taking a rapid survey of the course of the
-English cotton industry.
-From 1770 to 1815 this trade was depressed or stagnant for 5 years only. During this period of 45
-years the English manufacturers had a monopoly of machinery and of the markets of the world.
-From 1815 to 1821 depression; 1822 and 1823 prosperity; 1824 abolition of the laws against
-Trades’ Unions, great extension of factories everywhere; 1825 crisis; 1826 great misery and riots
-among the factory operatives; 1827 slight improvement; 1828 great increase in power-looms, and
-in exports; 1829 exports, especially to India, surpass all former years; 1830 glutted markets, great
-distress; 1831 to 1833 continued depression, the monopoly of the trade with India and China
-withdrawn from the East India Company; 1834 great increase of factories and machinery,
-shortness of hands. The new poor law furthers the migration of agricultural labourers into the
-factory districts. The country districts swept of children. White slave trade; 1835 great prosperity,
-contemporaneous starvation of the hand-loom weavers; 1836 great prosperity; 1837 and 1838
-depression and crisis; 1839 revival; 1840 great depression, riots, calling out of the military; 1841
-and 1842 frightful suffering among the factory operatives; 1842 the manufacturers lock the hands
-out of the factories in order to enforce the repeal of the Corn Laws. The operatives stream in
-thousands into the towns of Lancashire and Yorkshire, are driven back by the military, and their
-leaders brought to trial at Lancaster; 1843 great misery; 1844 revival; 1845 great prosperity; 1846
-continued improvement at first, then reaction. Repeal of the Corn Laws; 1847 crisis, general
-reduction of wages by 10 and more per cent. in honour of the “big loaf"; 1848 continued
-depression; Manchester under military protection; 1849 revival; 1850 prosperity; 1851 falling
-prices, low wages, frequent strikes; 1852 improvement begins, strikes continue, the
-manufacturers threaten to import foreign hands; 1853 increasing exports. Strike for 8 months, and
-great misery at Preston; 1854 prosperity, glutted markets; 1855 news of failures stream in from
-301 Chapter 15
-the United States, Canada, and the Eastern markets; 1856 great prosperity; 1857 crisis; 1858
-improvement; 1859 great prosperity, increase in factories; 1860 Zenith of the English cotton
-trade, the Indian, Australian, and other markets so glutted with goods that even in 1863 they had
-not absorbed the whole lot; the French Treaty of Commerce, enormous growth of factories and
-machinery; 1861 prosperity continues for a time, reaction, the American Civil War, cotton
-famine: 1862 to 1863 complete collapse.
-The history of the cotton famine is too characteristic to dispense with dwelling upon it for a
-moment. From the indications as to the condition of the markets of the world in 1860 and 1861,
-we see that the cotton famine came in the nick of time for the manufacturers, and was to some
-extent advantageous to them, a fact that was acknowledged in the reports of the Manchester
-Chamber of Commerce, proclaimed in Parliament by Palmerston and Derby, and confirmed by
-events.156 No doubt, among the 2,887 cotton mills in the United Kingdom in 1861, there were
-many of small size. According to the report of Mr. A. Redgrave, out of the 2,109 mills included
-in his district, 392, or 19% employed less than ten horse-power each; 345, or 16% employed 10
-H. P., and less than 20 H. P.; while 1,372 employed upwards of 20 H. P.157 The majority of the
-small mills were weaving sheds, built during the period of prosperity after 1858, for the most part
-by speculators, of whom one supplied the yarn, another the machinery, a third the buildings, and
-were worked by men who had been overlookers, or by other persons of small means. These small
-manufacturers mostly went to the wall. The same fate would have overtaken them in the
-commercial crisis that was staved off only by the cotton famine. Although they formed one-third
-of the total number of manufacturers, yet their mills absorbed a much smaller part of the capital
-invested in the cotton trade. As to the extent of the stoppage, it appears from authentic estimates,
-that in October 1862, 60.3% of the spindles, and 58% of the looms were standing. This refers to
-the cotton trade as a whole, and, of course, requires considerable modification for individual
-districts. Only very few mills worked full time (60 hours a week), the remainder worked at
-intervals. Even in those few cases where full time was worked, and at the customary rate of piece-
-wage, the weekly wages of the operatives necessarily shrank, owing to good cotton being
-replaced by bad, Sea Island by Egyptian (in fine spinning mills), American and Egyptian by
-Surat, and pure cotton by mixings of waste and Surat. The shorter fibre of the Surat cotton and its
-dirty condition, the greater fragility of the thread, the substitution of all sorts of heavy ingredients
-for flour in sizing the warps, all these lessened the speed of the machinery, or the number of the
-looms that could be superintended by one weaver, increased the labour caused by defects in the
-machinery, and reduced the piece-wage by reducing the mass of the product turned off. Where
-Surat cotton was used, the loss to the operatives when on full time, amounted to 20, 30, and more
-per cent. But besides this, the majority of the manufacturers reduced the rate of piece-wage by 5,
-7½, and 10 per cent. We can therefore conceive the situation of those hands who were employed
-for only 3, 3½ or 4 days a week, or for only 6 hours a day. Even in 1863, after a comparative
-improvement had set in, the weekly wages of spinners and of weavers were 3s. 4d., 3s. 10d., 4s.
-6d. and 5s. 1d.158 Even in this miserable state of things, however, the inventive spirit of the master
-never stood still, but was exercised in making deductions from wages. These were to some extent
-inflicted as a penalty for defects in the finished article that were really due to his bad cotton and
-to his unsuitable machinery. Moreover, where the manufacturer owned the cottages of the
-workpeople, he paid himself his rents by deducting the amount from these miserable wages. Mr.
-Redgrave tells us of self-acting minders (operatives who manage a pair of self-acting mules)
-“earning at the end of a fortnight’s full work 8s. 11d., and that from this sum was
-deducted the rent of the house, the manufacturer, however, returning half the rent
-as a gift. The minders took away the sum of 6s. 11d. In many places the self-
-302 Chapter 15
-acting minders ranged from 5s. to 9s. per week, and the weavers from 2s. to 6s.
-per week, during the latter part of 1862.”159
-Even when working short time the rent was frequently deducted from the wages of the
-operatives.160 No wonder that in some parts of Lancashire a kind of famine fever broke out. But
-more characteristic than all this, was, the revolution that took place in the process of production at
-the expense of the workpeople. Experimenta in corpore vili, like those of anatomists on frogs,
-were formally made.
-“Although,” says Mr. Redgrave, “I have given the actual earnings of the
-operatives in the several mills, it does not follow that they earn the same amount
-week by week. The operatives are subject to great fluctuation from the constant
-experimentalising of the manufacturers ... the earnings of the operatives rise and
-fall with the quality of the cotton mixings; sometimes they have been within 15
-per cent. of former earnings, and then, in a week or two, they have fallen off from
-50 to 60 per cent.”161
-These experiments were not made solely at the expense of the workman’s means of subsistence.
-His five senses also had to pay the penalty.
-“The people who are employed in making up Surat cotton complain very much.
-They inform me, on opening the bales of cotton there is an intolerable smell,
-which causes sickness.... In the mixing, scribbling and carding rooms, the dust and
-dirt which are disengaged, irritate the air passages, and give rise to cough and
-difficulty of breathing. A disease of the skin, no doubt from the irritation of the
-dirt contained in the Surat cotton, also prevails.... The fibre being so short, a great
-amount of size, both animal and vegetable, is used.... Bronchitis is more prevalent
-owing to the dust. Inflammatory sore throat is common, from the same cause.
-Sickness and dyspepsia are produced by the frequent breaking of the weft, when
-the weaver sucks the weft through the eye of the shuttle.” On the other hand, the
-substitutes for flour were a Fortunatus’ purse to the manufacturers, by increasing
-the weight of the yarn. They caused “15 lbs. of raw material to weigh 26 lbs. after
-it was woven.”162
-In the Report of Inspectors of Factories for 30th April, 1864, we read as follows:
-“The trade is availing itself of this resource at present to an extent which is even
-discreditable. I have heard on good authority of a cloth weighing 8 lbs. which was
-made of 5 1/4 lbs. cotton and 2 3/4 lbs. size; and of another cloth weighing 5 1/4
-lbs., of which 2 lbs. was size. These were ordinary export shirtings. In cloths of
-other descriptions, as much as 50 per cent. size is sometimes added; so that a
-manufacturer may, and does truly boast, that he is getting rich by selling cloth for
-less money per pound than he paid for the mere yarn of which they are
-composed.” 163
-But the workpeople had to suffer, not only from the experiments of the manufacturers inside the
-mills, and of the municipalities outside, not only from reduced wages and absence of work, from
-want and from charity, and from the eulogistic speeches of lords and commons.
-“Unfortunate females who, in consequence of the cotton famine, were at its
-commencement thrown out of employment, and have thereby become outcasts of
-society; and now, though trade has revived, and work is plentiful, continue
-members of that unfortunate class, and are likely to continue so. There are also in
-the borough more youthful prostitutes than I have known for the last 25 years.” 164
-303 Chapter 15
-We find then, in the first 45 years of the English cotton trade, from 1770 to 1815, only 5 years of
-crisis and stagnation; but this was the period of monopoly. The second period from 1815 to 1863
-counts, during its 48 years, only 20 years of revival and prosperity against 28 of depression and
-stagnation. Between 1815 and 1830 the competition with the continent of Europe and with the
-United States sets in. After 1833, the extension of the Asiatic markets is enforced by “destruction
-of the human race” (the wholesale extinction of Indian hand-loom weavers). After the repeal of
-the Corn Laws, from 1846 to 1863, there are 8 years of moderate activity and prosperity against 9
-years of depression and stagnation. The condition of the adult male operatives, even during the
-years of prosperity, may be judged from the note subjoined.165
-Section 8: Revolution Effected in Manufacture, Handicrafts,
-and Domestic Industry by Modern Industry
-A. Overthrow of Co-operation Based on Handicraft and on
-the Division of Labour
-We have seen how machinery does away with co-operation based on handicrafts, and with
-manufacture based on the division of handicraft labour. An example of the first sort is the
-mowing-machine; it replaces co-operation between mowers. A striking example of the second
-kind, is the needle-making machine. According to Adam Smith, 10 men, in his day, made in co-
-operation, over 48,000 needles a-day. On the other hand, a single needle-machine makes 145,000
-in a working day of 11 hours. One woman or one girl superintends four such machines, and so
-produces near upon 600,000 needles in a day, and upwards of 3,000,000 in a week.166 A single
-machine, when it takes the place of co-operation or of manufacture, may itself serve as the basis
-of an industry of a handicraft character. Still, such a return to handicrafts is but a transition to the
-factory system, which, as a rule, makes its appearance so soon as the human muscles are replaced,
-for the purpose of driving the machines, by a mechanical motive power, such as steam or water.
-Here and there, but in any case only for a time, an industry may be carried on, on a small scale,
-by means of mechanical power. This is effected by hiring steam-power, as is done in some of the
-Birmingham trades, or by the use of small caloric-engines, as in some branches of weaving.167 In
-the Coventry silk weaving industry the experiment of “cottage factories” was tried. In the centre
-of a square surrounded by rows of cottages, an engine-house was built and the engine connected
-by shafts with the looms in the cottages. In all cases the power was hired at so much per loom.
-The rent was payable weekly, whether the looms worked or not. Each cottage held from 2 to 6
-looms; some belonged to the weaver, some were bought on credit, some were hired. The struggle
-between these cottage factories and the factory proper, lasted over 12 years. It ended with the
-complete ruin of the 300 cottage factories.168 Wherever the nature of the process did not involve
-production on a large scale, the new industries that have sprung up in the last few decades, such
-as envelope making, steel-pen making, &c., have, as a general rule, first passed through the
-handicraft stage, and then the manufacturing stage, as short phases of transition to the factory
-stage. The transition is very difficult in those cases where the production of the article by
-manufacture consists, not of a series of graduated processes, but of a great number of
-disconnected ones. This circumstance formed a great hindrance to the establishment of steel-pen
-factories. Nevertheless, about 15 years ago, a machine was invented that automatically performed
-6 separate operations at once. The first steel-pens were supplied by the handicraft system, in the
-year 1820, at £7 4s. the gross; in 1830 they-were supplied by manufacture at 8s., and today the
-factory system supplies them to the trade at from 2 to 6d. the gross.169
-304 Chapter 15
-B. Reaction of the Factory System on Manufacture and
-Domestic Industries
-Along with the development of the factory system and of the revolution in agriculture that
-accompanies it, production in all the other branches of industry not only extends, but alters its
-character. The principle, carried out in the factory system, of analysing the process of production
-into its constituent phases, and of solving the problems thus proposed by the application of
-mechanics, of chemistry, and of the whole range of the natural sciences, becomes the determining
-principle everywhere. Hence, machinery squeezes itself into the manufacturing industries first for
-one detail process, then for another. Thus the solid crystal of their organisation, based on the old
-division of labour, becomes dissolved, and makes way for constant changes. Independently of
-this, a radical change takes place in the composition of the collective labourer, a change of the
-persons working in combination. In contrast with the manufacturing period, the division of labour
-is thenceforth based, wherever possible, on the employment of women, of children of all ages,
-and of unskilled labourers, in one word, on cheap labour, as it is characteristically called in
-England. This is the case not only with all production on a large scale, whether employing
-machinery or not, but also with the so-called domestic industry, whether carried on in the houses
-of the workpeople or in small workshops. This modern so-called domestic industry has nothing,
-except the name, in common with the old-fashioned domestic industry, the existence of which
-pre-supposes independent urban handicrafts, independent peasant farming, and above all, a
-dwelling-house for the labourer and his family. That old-fashioned industry has now been
-converted into an outside department of the factory, the manufactory, or the warehouse. Besides
-the factory operatives, the manufacturing workmen and the handicraftsman, whom it concentrates
-in large masses at one spot, and directly commands, capital also sets in motion, by means, of
-invisible threads, another army; that of the workers in the domestic industries, who dwell in the
-large towns and are also scattered over the face of the country. An example: The shirt factory of
-Messrs. Tillie at Londonderry, which employs 1,000 operatives in the factory itself, and 9,000
-people spread up and down the country and working in their own houses.170
-The exploitation of cheap and immature labour-power is carried out in a more shameless manner
-in modern Manufacture than in the factory proper. This is because the technical foundation of the
-factory system, namely, the substitution of machines for muscular power, and the light character
-of the labour, is almost entirely absent in Manufacture, and at the same time women and over-
-young children are subjected, in a most unconscionable way, to the influence of poisonous or
-injurious substances. This exploitation is more shameless in the so-called domestic industry than
-in manufactures, and that because the power of resistance in the labourers decreases with their
-dissemination; because a whole series of plundering parasites insinuate themselves between the
-employer and the workman; because a domestic industry has always to compete either with the
-factory system, or with manufacturing in the same branch of production; because poverty robs the
-workman of the conditions most essential to his labour, of space, light and ventilation; because
-employment becomes more and more irregular; and, finally, because in these the last resorts of
-the masses made “redundant” by modern industry and Agriculture, competition for work attains
-its maximum. Economy in the means of production, first systematically carried out in the factory
-system, and there, from the very beginning, coincident with the most reckless squandering of
-labour-power, and robbery of the conditions normally requisite for labour – this economy now
-shows its antagonistic and murderous side more and more in a given branch of industry, the less
-the social productive power of labour and the technical basis for a combination of processes are
-developed in that branch.
-305 Chapter 15
-C. Modern Manufacture
-I now proceed, by a few examples, to illustrate the principles laid down above. As a matter of
-fact, the reader is already familiar with numerous instances given in the chapter on the working
-day. In the hardware manufactures of Birmingham and the neighbourhood, there are employed,
-mostly in very heavy work, 30,000 children and young persons, besides 10,000 women. There
-they are to be seen in the unwholesome brass-foundries, button factories, enamelling, galvanising,
-and lackering works.171 Owing to the excessive labour of their workpeople, both adult and non-
-adult, certain London houses where newspapers and books are printed, have got the ill-omened
-name of “slaughterhouses.”172 Similar excesses are practised in book-binding, where the victims
-are chiefly women, girls, and children; young persons have to do heavy work in rope-walks and
-night-work in salt mines, candle manufactories, and chemical works; young people are worked to
-death at turning the looms in silk weaving, when it is not carried on by machinery.173 One of the
-most shameful, the most dirty, and the worst paid kinds of labour, and one on which women and
-young girls are by preference employed, is the sorting of rags. It is well known that Great Britain,
-apart from its own immense store of rags, is the emporium for the rag trade of the whole world.
-They flow in from Japan, from the most remote States of South America, and from the Canary
-Islands. But the chief sources of their supply are Germany, France, Russia, Italy, Egypt, Turkey,
-Belgium, and Holland. They are used for manure, for making bedflocks, for shoddy, and they
-serve as the raw material of paper. The rag-sorters are the medium for the spread of small-pox
-and other infectious diseases, and they themselves are the first victims.174 A classical example of
-over-work, of hard and inappropriate labour, and of its brutalising effects on the workman from
-his childhood upwards, is afforded not only by coal-mining and miners generally, but also by tile
-and brick making, in which industry the recently invented machinery is, in England, used only
-here and there. Between May and September the work lasts from 5 in the morning till 8 in the
-evening, and where the drying is done in the open air, it often lasts from 4 in the morning till 9 in
-the evening. Work from 5 in the morning till 7 in the evening is considered “reduced” and
-“moderate.” Both boys and girls of 6 and even of 4 years of age are employed. They work for the
-same number of hours, often longer, than the adults. The work is hard and the summer heat
-increases the exhaustion. In a certain tile-field at Mosley, e.g., a young woman, 24 years of age,
-was in the habit of making 2,000 tiles a day, with the assistance of 2 little girls, who carried the
-clay for her, and stacked the tiles. These girls carried daily 10 tons up the slippery sides of the
-clay pits, from a depth of 30 feet, and then for a distance of 210 feet.
-“It is impossible for a child to pass through the purgatory of a tile-field without
-great moral degradation... the low language, which they are accustomed to hear
-from their tenderest years, the filthy, indecent, and shameless habits, amidst
-which, unknowing, and half wild, they grow up, make them in after-life lawless,
-abandoned, dissolute.... A frightful source of demoralisation is the mode of living.
-Each moulder, who is always a skilled labourer, and the chief of a group, supplies
-his 7 subordinates with board and lodging in his cottage. Whether members of his
-family or not, the men, boys, and girls all sleep in the cottage, which contains
-generally two, exceptionally 3 rooms, all on the ground floor, and badly
-ventilated. These people are so exhausted after the day’s hard work, that neither
-the rules of health, of cleanliness, nor of decency are in the least observed. Many
-of these cottages are models of untidiness, dirt, and dust.... The greatest evil of the
-system that employs young girls on this sort of work, consists in this, that, as a
-rule, it chains them fast from childhood for the whole of their after-life to the most
-abandoned rabble. They become rough, foul-mouthed boys, before Nature has
-306 Chapter 15
-taught them that they are women. Clothed in a few dirty rags, the legs naked far
-above the knees, hair and face besmeared with dirt, they learn to treat all feelings
-of decency and of shame with contempt. During meal-times they lie at full length
-in the fields, or watch the boys bathing in a neighbouring canal. Their heavy day’s
-work at length completed, they put on better clothes, and accompany the men to
-the public houses.”
-That excessive insobriety is prevalent from childhood upwards among the whole of this class, is
-only natural.
-“The worst is that the brickmakers despair of themselves. You might as well, said
-one of the better kind to a chaplain of Southallfield, try to raise and improve the
-devil as a brickie, sir!”175
-As to the manner, in which capital effects an economy in the requisites of labour, in modern
-Manufacture (in which I include all workshops of larger size, except factories proper), official
-and most ample material bearing on it is to be found in the Public Health Reports IV. (1863) and
-VI. (1864). The description of the workshops, more especially those of the London printers and
-tailors, surpasses the most loathsome phantasies of our romance writers. The effect on the health
-of the workpeople is self-evident. Dr. Simon, the chief medical officer of the Privy Council and
-the official editor of the “Public Health Reports,” says:
-“In my fourth Report (1863) I showed, how it is practically impossible for the
-workpeople to insist upon that which is their first sanitary right, viz., the right that,
-no matter what the work for which their employer brings them together, the
-labour, so far as it depends upon him, should be freed from all avoidably
-unwholesome conditions. I pointed out, that while the workpeople are practically
-incapable of doing themselves this sanitary justice, they are unable to obtain any
-effective support from the paid administrations of the sanitary police.... The life of
-myriads of workmen and workwomen is now uselessly tortured and shortened by
-the never-ending physical suffering that their mere occupation begets.”176
-In illustration of the way in which the workrooms influence the state of health Dr. Simon gives
-the following table of mortality.177
-Number of Persons of all
-ages in the respective
-industries
-Industry
-compared as
-regards health
-Death-rate per 100,000 men
-in the respective industries
-between the stated ages
-Age 25-35 Age 35-45 Age 45-55
-958,265 Agriculture in
-England &
-Wales
-743 805 1141
-22,301 men
-12,379 women } London tailors 958 1,262 2,093
-13,803 London printers 894 1,747 2,367
-307 Chapter 15
-D. Modern Domestic Industry
-I now come to the so-called domestic industry. In order to get an idea of the horrors of this
-sphere, in which capital conducts its exploitation in the background of modern mechanical
-industry, one must go to the apparently quite idyllic trade of nail-making,178 carried on in a few
-remote villages of England. In this place, however, it will be enough to give a few examples from
-those branches of the lace-making and straw-plaiting industries that are not yet carried on by the
-aid of machinery, and that as yet do not compete with branches carried on in factories or in
-manufactories.
-Of the 150,000 persons employed in England in the production of lace, about 10,000 fall under
-the authority of the Factory Act, 1861. Almost the whole of the remaining 140,000 are women,
-young persons, and children of both sexes, the male sex, however, being weakly represented. The
-state of health of this cheap material for exploitation will be seen from the following table,
-computed by Dr. Trueman, physician to the Nottingham General Dispensary. Out of 686 female
-patients who were lace-makers, most of them between the ages of 17 and 24, the number of
-consumptive ones were:
-1852. – 1 in 45. 1857. – 1 in 13.
-1853. – 1 in 28. 1858. – 1 in 15.
-1854. – 1 in 17. 1859. – 1 in 9.
-1856. – 1 in 15. 1861. – 1 in 8.179
-This progress in the rate of consumption ought to suffice for the most optimist of progressists,
-and for the biggest hawker of lies among the Free-trade bagmen of Germany.
-The Factory Act of 1861 regulates the actual making of the lace, so far as it is done by machinery,
-and this is the rule in England. The branches that we are now about to examine, solely with regard
-to those of the workpeople who work at home, and not those who work in manufactories or
-warehouses, fall into two divisions, viz. (1), finishing; (2), mending. The former gives the
-finishing touches to the machine-made lace, and includes numerous sub-divisions.
-The lace finishing is done either in what are called “mistresses’ houses,” or by women in their
-own houses, with or without the help of their children. The women who keep the “mistresses’
-houses” are themselves poor. The workroom is in a private house. The mistresses take orders
-from manufacturers, or from warehousemen, and employ as many women, girls, and young
-children as the size of their rooms and the fluctuating demand of the business will allow. The
-number of the workwomen employed in these workrooms varies from 20 to 40 in some, and from
-10 to 20 in others. The average age at which the children commence work is six years, but in
-many cases it is below five. The usual working-hours are from 8 in the morning till eight in the
-evening, with 1½ hours for meals, which are taken at irregular intervals, and often in the foul
-workrooms. When business is brisk, the labour frequently lasts from 8 or even 6 o’clock in the
-morning till 10, 11, or 12 o’clock at night. In English barracks the regulation space allotted to
-each soldier is 500-600 cubic feet, and in the military hospitals 1,200 cubic feet. But in those
-finishing sties there are but 67 to 100 cubic feet to each person. At the same time the oxygen of
-the air is consumed by gas-lights. In order to keep the lace clean, and although the floor is tiled or
-gagged, the children are often compelled, even in winter, to pull off their shoes.
-“It is not at all uncommon in Nottingham to find 14 to 20 children huddled
-together in a small room, of, perhaps, not more than 12 feet square, and employed
-for 15 hours out of the 24, at work that of itself is exhausting, from its weariness
-and monotony, and is besides carried on under every possible unwholesome
-condition.... Even the very youngest children work with a strained attention and a
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-rapidity that is astonishing, hardly ever giving their fingers rest or glowering their
-motion. If a question be asked them, they never raise their eyes from their work
-from fear of losing a single moment.”
-The “long stick” is used by the mistresses as a stimulant more and more as the working hours are
-prolonged.
-“The children gradually tire and become as restless as birds towards the end of
-their long detention at an occupation that is monotonous, eye-straining, and
-exhausting from the uniformity in the posture of the body. Their work is like
-slavery.” 180
-When women and their children work at home, which now-a-days means in a hired room, often in
-a garret, the state of things is, if possible, still worse. This sort of work is given out within a circle
-of 80 miles radius from Nottingham. On leaving the warehouses at 9 or 10 o’clock at night, the
-children are often given a bundle of lace to take home with them and finish. The Pharisee of a
-capitalist represented by one of his servants, accompanies this action, of course, with the
-unctuous phrase: “That’s for mother,” yet he knows well enough that the poor children must sit
-up and help.181
-Pillow lace-making is chiefly carried on in England in two agricultural districts; one, the Honiton
-lace district, extending from 20 to 30 miles along the south coast of Devonshire, and including a
-few places in North Devon; the other comprising a great part of the counties of Buckingham,
-Bedford, and Northampton, and also the adjoining portions of Oxfordshire and Huntingdonshire.
-The cottages of the agricultural labourers are the places where the work is usually carried on.
-Many manufacturers employ upwards of 3,000 of these lace-makers, who are chiefly children and
-young persons of the female sex exclusively. The state of things described as incidental to lace
-finishing is here repeated, save that instead of the “mistresses’ houses,” we find what are called
-“lace-schools,” kept by poor women in their cottages. From their fifth year and often earlier, until
-their twelfth or fifteenth year, the children work in these schools; during the first year the very
-young ones work from four to eight hours, and later on, from six in the morning till eight and ten
-o’clock at night.
-“The rooms are generally the ordinary living rooms of small cottages, the chimney
-stopped up to keep out draughts, the inmates kept warm by their own animal heat
-alone, and this frequently in winter. In other cases, these so-called school-rooms
-are like small store-rooms without fire-places.... The over-crowding in these dens
-and the consequent vitiation of the air are often extreme. Added to this is the
-injurious effect of drains, privies, decomposing substances, and other filth usual in
-the purlieus of the smaller cottages.” With regard to space: “In one lace-school 18
-girls and a mistress, 35 cubic feet to each person; in another, where the smell was
-unbearable, 18 persons and 24½ cubic feet per head. In this industry are to be
-found employed children of 2 and 2½ years.”182
-Where lace-making ends in the counties of Buckingham and Bedford, straw-plaiting begins, and
-extends over a large part of Hertfordshire and the westerly and northerly parts of Essex. In 1861,
-there were 40,043 persons employed in straw-plaiting and straw-hat making; of these 3,815 were
-males of all ages, the rest females, of whom 14,913, including about 7,000 children, were under
-20 years of age. In the place of the lace-schools we find here the “straw-plait schools.” The
-children commence their instruction in straw-plaiting generally in their 4th, often between their
-3rd and 4th year. Education, of course, they get none. The children themselves call the
-elementary schools, “natural schools,” to distinguish them from these blood-sucking institutions,
-in which they are kept at work simply to get through the task, generally 30 yards daily, prescribed
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-by their half-starved mothers. These same mothers often make them work at home, after school is
-over, till 10, 11, and 12 o’clock at night. The straw cuts their mouths, with which they constantly
-moisten it, and their fingers. Dr. Ballard gives it as the general opinion of the whole body of
-medical officers in London, that 300 cubic feet is the minimum space proper for each person in a
-bedroom or workroom. But in the straw-plait schools space is more sparingly allotted than in the
-lace-schools, “12 2/3, 17, 18½ and below 22 cubic feet for each person.”
-“The smaller of these numbers, says one of the commissioners, Mr. White,
-represents less space than the half of what a child would occupy if packed in a box
-measuring 3 feet in each direction.”
-Thus do the children enjoy life till the age of 12 or 14. The wretched half-starved parents think of
-nothing but getting as much as possible out of their children. The latter, as soon as they are grown
-up, do not care a farthing, and naturally so, for their parents, and leave them.
-“It is no wonder that ignorance and vice abound in a population so brought up....
-Their morality is at the lowest ebb,... a great number of the women have
-illegitimate children, and that at such an immature age that even those most
-conversant with criminal statistics are astounded.”183
-And the native land of these model families is the pattern Christian country for Europe; so says at
-least Count Montalembert, certainly a competent authority on Christianity!
-Wages in the above industries, miserable as they are (the maximum wages of a child in the straw-
-plait schools rising in rare cases to 3 shillings), are reduced far below their nominal amount by the
-prevalence of the truck system everywhere, but especially in the lace districts.184
-E. Passage of Modern Manufacture, and Domestic
-Industry into Modern Mechanical Industry. The Hastening
-of this Revolution by the Application of the Factory Acts to
-those Industries
-The cheapening of labour-power, by sheer abuse of the labour of women and children, by sheer
-robbery of every normal condition requisite for working and living, and by the sheer brutality of
-overwork and night-work, meets at last with natural obstacles that cannot be overstepped. So also,
-when based on these methods, do the cheapening of commodities and capitalist exploitation in
-general. So soon as this point is at last reached – and it takes many years – the hour has struck for
-the introduction of machinery, and for the thenceforth rapid conversion of the scattered domestic
-industries and also of manufactures into factory industries.
-An example, on the most colossal scale, of this movement is afforded by the production of
-wearing apparel. This industry, according to the classification of the Children’s Employment
-Commission, comprises straw-hat makers, ladies’-hat makers, cap-makers, tailors, milliners and
-dressmakers, shirt-makers, corset-makers, glove-makers, shoemakers, besides many minor
-branches, such as the making of neck-ties, collars, &c. In 1861, the number of females employed
-in these industries, in England and Wales, amounted to 586,299, of these 115,242 at the least
-were under 20, and 16,650. under 15 years of age. The number of these workwomen in the United
-Kingdom in 1861, was 750,334. The number of males employed in England and Wales, in hat-
-making, shoemaking, glove-making and tailoring was 437,969; of these 14,964 under 15 years,
-89,285 between 15 and 20, and 333,117 over 20 years. Many of the smaller branches are not
-included in these figures. But take the figures as they stand; we then have for England and Wales
-alone, according to the census of 1861, a total of 1,024,277 persons, about as many as are
-absorbed by agriculture and cattle breeding. We begin to understand what becomes of the
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-immense quantities of goods conjured up by the magic of machinery, and of the enormous masses
-of workpeople, which that machinery sets free.
-The production of wearing apparel is carried on partly in manufactories in whose workrooms
-there is but a reproduction of that division of labour, the membra disjecta of which were found
-ready to hand; partly by small master-handicraftsmen; these, however, do not, as formerly, work
-for individual consumers, but for manufactories and warehouses, and to such an extent that often
-whole towns and stretches of country carry on certain branches, such as shoemaking, as a
-speciality; finally, on a very great scale by the so-called domestic workers, who form an external
-department of the manufactories, warehouses, and even of the workshops of the smaller
-masters.185
-The raw material, &c., is supplied by mechanical industry, the mass of cheap human material
-(taillable à merci et miséricorde) is composed of the individuals “liberated” by mechanical
-industry and improved agriculture. The manufactures of this class owed their origin chiefly to the
-capitalist’s need of having at hand an army ready equipped to meet any increase of demand.186
-These manufactures, nevertheless, allowed the scattered handicrafts and domestic industries to
-continue to exist as a broad foundation. The great production of surplus-value in these branches
-of labour, and the progressive cheapening of their articles, were and are chiefly due to the
-minimum wages paid, no more than requisite for a miserable vegetation, and to the extension of
-working-time up to the maximum endurable by the human organism. It was in fact by the
-cheapness of the human sweat and the human blood, which were converted into commodities,
-that the markets were constantly being extended, and continue daily to be extended; more
-especially was this the case with England’s colonial markets, where, besides, English tastes and
-habits prevail. At last the critical point was reached. The basis of the old method, sheer brutality
-in the exploitation of the workpeople, accompanied more or less by a systematic division of
-labour, no longer sufficed for the extending markets and for the still more rapidly extending
-competition of the capitalists. The hour struck for the advent of machinery. The decisively
-revolutionary machine, the machine which attacks in an equal degree the whole of the numberless
-branches of this sphere of production, dressmaking, tailoring, shoemaking, sewing, hat-making,
-and many others, is the sewing-machine.
-Its immediate effect on the workpeople is like that of all machinery, which, since the rise of
-modern industry, has seized upon new branches of trade. Children of too tender an age are sent
-adrift. The wage of the machine hands rises compared with that of the house-workers, many of
-whom belong to the poorest of the poor. That of the better situated handicraftsman, with whom
-the machine competes, sinks. The new machine hands are exclusively girls and young women.
-With the help of mechanical force, they destroy the monopoly that male labour had of the heavier
-work, and they drive off from the lighter work numbers of old women and very young children.
-The overpowering competition crushes the weakest of the manual labourers. The fearful increase
-in death from starvation during the last 10 years in London runs parallel with the extension of
-machine sewing.187 The new workwomen turn the machines by hand and foot, or by hand alone,
-sometimes sitting, sometimes standing, according to the weight, size, and special make of the
-machine, and expend a great deal of labour-power. Their occupation is unwholesome, owing to
-the long hours, although in most cases they are not so long as under the old system. Wherever the
-sewing-machine locates itself in narrow and already over-crowded workrooms, it adds to the
-unwholesome influences.
-“The effect,” says Mr. Lord, “on entering low-ceiled workrooms in which 30 to 40 machine
-hands are working is unbearable.... The heat, partly due to the gas stoves used for warming the
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-irons, is horrible.... Even when moderate hours of work, i.e., from 8 in the morning till 6 in the
-evening, prevail in such places, yet 3 or 4 persons fall into a swoon regularly every day.”188
-The revolution in the industrial methods which is the necessary result of the revolution in the
-instruments of production, is effected by a medley of transition forms. These forms vary
-according to the extent to which the sewing-machine has become prevalent in one branch, of
-industry or the other, to the time during which it has been in operation, to the previous condition
-of the workpeople, to the preponderance of manufacture, of handicrafts or of domestic industry,
-to the rent of the workrooms,189 &c. In dressmaking, for instance, where the labour for the most
-part was already organised, chiefly by simple co-operation, the sewing-machine at first formed
-merely a new factor in that manufacturing industry. In tailoring, shirtmaking, shoemaking, &c.,
-all the forms are intermingled. Here the factory system proper. There middlemen receive the raw
-material from the capitalist en chef, and group around their sewing-machines, in “chambers” and
-“garrets,” from 10 to 50 or more workwomen. Finally, as is always the case with machinery when
-not organised into a system, and when it can also be used in dwarfish proportions, handicraftsman
-and domestic workers, along with their families, or with a little extra labour from without, make
-use of their own sewing-machines.190 The system actually prevalent in England is, that the
-capitalist concentrates a large number of machines on his premises, and then distributes the
-produce of those machines for further manipulation amongst the domestic workers.191 The variety
-of the transition forms, however, does not conceal the tendency to conversion into the factory
-system proper. This tendency is nurtured by the very nature of the sewing-machine, the manifold
-uses of which push on the concentration, under one roof, and one management, of previously
-separated branches of a trade. It is also favoured by the circumstance that preparatory
-needlework, and certain other operations, are most conveniently done on the premises where the
-machine is at work; as well as by the inevitable expropriation of the hand sewers, and of the
-domestic workers who work with their own machines. This fate has already in part overtaken
-them. The constantly increasing amount of capital invested in sewing-machines,192 gives the spur
-to the production of, and gluts the markets with, machine-made articles, thereby giving the signal
-to the domestic workers for the sale of their machines. The overproduction of sewing-machines
-themselves, causes their producers, in bad want of a sale, to let them out for so much a week, thus
-crushing by their deadly competition the small owners of machines.193 Constant changes in the
-construction of the machines, and their ever-increasing cheapness, depreciate day by day the
-older makes, and allow of their being sold in great numbers, at absurd prices, to large capitalists,
-who alone can thus employ them at a profit. Finally, the substitution of the steam-engine for man
-gives in this, as in all similar revolutions, the finishing blow. At first, the use of steam power
-meets with mere technical difficulties, such as unsteadiness in the machines, difficulty in
-controlling their speed, rapid wear and tear of the lighter machines, &c., all of which are soon
-overcome by experience.194 If, on the one hand, the concentration of many machines in large
-manufactories leads to the use of steam power, on the other hand, the competition of steam with
-human muscles hastens on the concentration of workpeople and machines in large factories. Thus
-England is at present experiencing, not only in the colossal industry of making wearing apparel,
-but in most of the other trades mentioned above, the conversion of manufacture, of handicrafts,
-and of domestic work into the factory system, after each of those forms of production, totally
-changed and disorganised under the influence of modern industry, has long ago reproduced, and
-even overdone, all the horrors of the factory system, without participating in any of the elements
-of social progress it contains.195
-This industrial revolution which takes place spontaneously, is artificially helped on by the
-extension of the Factory Acts to all industries in which women, young persons and children are
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-employed. The compulsory regulation of the working day as regards its length, pauses, beginning
-and end, the system of relays of children, the exclusion of all children under a certain age, &c.,
-necessitate on the one hand more machinery196 and the substitution of steam as a motive power in
-the place of muscles.197 On the other hand, in order to make up for the loss of time, an expansion
-occurs of the means of production used in common, of the furnaces, buildings, &c., in one word,
-greater concentration of the means of production and a correspondingly greater concourse of
-workpeople. The chief objection, repeatedly and passionately urged on behalf of each
-manufacture threatened with the Factory Act, is in fact this, that in order to continue the business
-on the old scale a greater outlay of capital will be necessary. But as regards labour in the so-called
-domestic industries and the intermediate forms between them and Manufacture, so soon as limits
-are put to the working day and to the employment of children, those industries go to the wall.
-Unlimited exploitation of cheap labour-power is the sole foundation of their power to compete.
-One of the essential conditions for the existence of the factory system, especially when the length
-of the working day is fixed, is certainty in the result, i.e., the production in a given time of a given
-quantity of commodities, or of a given useful effect. The statutory pauses in the working day,
-moreover, imply the assumption that periodical and sudden cessation of the work does no harm to
-the article undergoing the process of production. This certainty in the result, and this possibility
-of interrupting the work are, of course, easier to be attained in the purely mechanical industries
-than in those in which chemical and physical processes play a part; as, for instance, in the
-earthenware trade, in bleaching, dyeing, baking, and in most of the metal industries. Wherever
-there is a workingday without restriction as to length, wherever there is night-work and
-unrestricted waste of human life, there the slightest obstacle presented by the nature of the work
-to a change for the better is soon looked upon as an everlasting barrier erected by Nature. No
-poison kills vermin with more certainty than the Factory Act removes such everlasting barriers.
-No one made a greater outcry over “impossibilities” than our friends the earthenware
-manufacturers. In 1864, however, they were brought under the Act, and within sixteen months
-every “impossibility” had vanished.
-“The improved method,” called forth by the Act, “of making slip by pressure
-instead of by evaporation, the newly-constructed stoves for drying the ware in its
-green state, &c., are each events of great importance in the pottery art, and mark
-an advance which the preceding century could not rival.... It has even
-considerably reduced the temperature of the stoves themselves with a considerable
-saving of fuel, and with a readier effect on the ware.”198
-In spite of every prophecy, the cost-price of earthenware did not rise, but the quantity produced
-did, and to such an extent that the export for the twelve months, ending December, 1865,
-exceeded in value by £138,628 the average of the preceding three years. In the manufacture of
-matches it was thought to be an indispensable requirement, that boys, even while bolting their
-dinner, should go on dipping the matches in melted phosphorus, the poisonous vapour from
-which rose into their faces. The Factory Act (1864) made the saving of time a necessity, and so
-forced into existence a dipping machine, the vapour from which could not come in contact with
-the workers.199 So, at the present time, in those branches of the lace manufacture not yet subject
-to the Factory Act, it is maintained that the meal-times cannot be regular owing to the different
-periods required by the various kinds of lace for drying, which periods vary from three minutes
-up to an hour and more. To this the Children’s Employment Commissioners answer:
-“The circumstances of this case are precisely analogous to that of the paper-
-stainers, dealt with in our first report. Some of the principal manufacturers in the
-trade urged that in consequence of the nature of the materials used, and their
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-various processes, they would be unable, without serious loss, to stop for meal-
-times at any given moment. But it was seen from the evidence that, by due care
-and previous arrangement, the apprehended difficulty would be got over; and
-accordingly, by clause 6 of section 6 of the Factory Acts Extension Act, passed
-during this Session of Parliament, an interval of eighteen months is given to them
-from the passing of the Act before they are required to conform to the meal hours,
-specified by the Factory Acts.”200
-Hardly had the Act been passed when our friends the manufacturers found out:
-“The inconveniences we expected to arise from the introduction of the Factory
-Acts into our branch of manufacture, I am happy to say, have not arisen. We do
-not find the production at all interfered with; in short, we produce more in the
-same time.”201
-It is evident that the English legislature, which certainly no one will venture to reproach with
-being overdosed with genius, has been led by experience to the conclusion that a simple
-compulsory law is sufficient to enact away all the so-called impediments, opposed by the nature
-of the process, to the restriction and regulation of the working day. Hence, on the introduction of
-the Factory Act into a given industry, a period varying from six to eighteen months is fixed within
-which it is incumbent on the manufacturers to remove all technical impediments to the working
-of the Act. Mirabeau’s “Impossible! ne me dites jamais ce bête de mot!” is particularly applicable
-to modern technology. But though the Factory Acts thus artificially ripen the material elements
-necessary for the conversion of the manufacturing system into the factory system, yet at the same
-time, owing to the necessity they impose for greater outlay of capital, they hasten on the decline
-of the small masters, and the concentration of capital.202
-Besides the purely technical impediments that are removable by technical means, the irregular
-habits of the workpeople themselves obstruct the regulation of the hours of labour. This is
-especially the case where piece-wage predominates, and where loss of time in one part of the day
-or week can be made good by subsequent over-time, or by night-work, a process which brutalises
-the adult workman, and ruins his wife and children.203 Although this absence of regularity in the
-expenditure of labour-power is a natural and rude reaction against the tedium of monotonous
-drudgery, it originates, also, to a much greater degree from anarchy in production, anarchy that in
-its turn pre-supposes unbridled exploitation of labour-power by the capitalist. Besides the general
-periodic changes of the industrial cycle, and the special fluctuations in the markets to which each
-industry is subject, we may also reckon what is called “the season,” dependent either on the
-periodicity of favourable seasons of the year for navigation; or on fashion, and the sudden placing
-of large orders that have to be executed in the shortest possible time. The habit of giving such
-orders becomes more frequent with the extension of railways and telegraphs.
-“The extension of the railway system throughout the country has tended very
-much to encourage giving short notice. Purchasers now come up from Glasgow,
-Manchester, and Edinburgh once every fortnight or so to the wholesale city
-warehouses which we supply, and give small orders requiring immediate
-execution, instead of buying from stock as they used to do. Years ago we were
-always able to work in the slack times, so as to meet demand of the next season,
-but now no one can say beforehand what will be the demand then.”204
-In those factories and manufactories that are not yet subject to the Factory Acts, the most fearful
-over-work prevails periodically during what is called the season, in consequence of sudden
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-orders. In the outside department of the factory, of the manufactory, and of the warehouse, the so-
-called domestic workers, whose employment is at the best irregular, are entirely dependent for
-their raw material and their orders on the caprice of the capitalist, who, in this industry, is not
-hampered by any regard for depreciation of his buildings and machinery, and risks nothing by a
-stoppage of work, but the skin of the worker himself. Here then he sets himself systematically to
-work to form an industrial reserve force that shall be ready at a moment’s notice; during one part
-of the year he decimates this force by the most inhuman toil, during the other part, he lets it starve
-for want of work.
-“The employers avail themselves of the habitual irregularity in the homework,
-when any extra work is wanted at a push, so that the work goes on till 11, and 12
-p.m. or 2 a.m., or as the usual phrase is, “all hours,” and that in localities where
-“the stench is enough to knock you down, you go to the door, perhaps, and open
-it, but shudder to go further.”205 “They are curious men,” said one of the
-witnesses, a shoemaker, speaking of the masters, “they think it does a boy no
-harm to work too hard for half the year, if he is nearly idle for the other half.”206
-In the same way as technical impediments, so, too, those “usages which have grown with the
-growth of trade” were and still are proclaimed by interested capitalists as obstacles due to the
-nature of the work. This was a favourite cry of the cotton lords at the time they were first
-threatened with the Factory Acts. Although their industry more than any other depends on
-navigation, yet experience has given them the lie. Since then, every pretended obstruction to
-business has been treated by the Factory inspectors as a mere sham.207 The thoroughly
-conscientious investigations of the Children’s Employment Commission prove that the effect of
-the regulation of the hours of work, in some industries, was to spread the mass of labour
-previously employed more evenly over the whole year208 that this regulation was the first rational
-bridle on the murderous, meaningless caprices of fashion,209 caprices that consort so badly with
-the system of modern industry; that the development of ocean navigation and of the means of
-communication generally, has swept away the technical basis on which season-work was really
-supported, 210and that all other so-called unconquerable difficulties vanish before larger buildings,
-additional machinery, increase in the number of workpeople employed,211 and the alterations
-caused by all these in the mode of conducting the wholesale trade.212 But for all that, capital never
-becomes reconciled to such changes – and this is admitted over and over again by its own
-representatives – except “under the pressure of a General Act of Parliament”213 for the
-compulsory regulation of the hours of labour.
-Section 9: The Factory Acts. Sanitary and Educational Clauses
-of the same. Their General Extension in England
-Factory legislation, that first conscious and methodical reaction of society against the
-spontaneously developed form of the process of production, is, as we have seen, just as much the
-necessary product of modern industry as cotton yarn, self-actors, and the electric telegraph.
-Before passing to the consideration of the extension of that legislation in England, we shall
-shortly notice certain clauses contained in the Factory Acts, and not relating to the hours of work.
-Apart from their wording, which makes it easy for the capitalist to evade them, the sanitary
-clauses are extremely meagre, and, in fact, limited to provisions for whitewashing the walls, for
-insuring cleanliness in some other matters, for ventilation, and for protection against dangerous
-machinery. In the third book we shall return again to the fanatical opposition of the masters to
-those clauses which imposed upon them a slight expenditure on appliances for protecting the
-315 Chapter 15
-limbs of their workpeople, an opposition that throws a fresh and glaring light on the Free-trade
-dogma, according to which, in a society with conflicting interests, each individual necessarily
-furthers the common weal by seeking nothing but his own personal advantage! One example is
-enough. The reader knows that during the last 20 years, the flax industry has very much extended,
-and that, with that extension, the number of scutching mills in Ireland has increased. In 1864
-there were in that country 1,800 of these mills. Regularly in autumn and winter women and
-“young persons,” the wives, sons, and daughters of the neighbouring small farmers, a class of
-people totally unaccustomed to machinery, are taken from field labour to feed the rollers of the
-scutching mills with flax. The accidents, both as regards number and kind, are wholly
-unexampled in the history of machinery. In one scutching mill, at Kildinan, near Cork, there
-occurred between 1852 and 1856, six fatal accidents and sixty mutilations; every one of which
-might have been prevented by the simplest appliances, at the cost of a few shillings. Dr. W.
-White, the certifying surgeon for factories at Downpatrick, states in his official report, dated the
-15th December, 1865:
-“The serious accidents at the scutching mills are of the most fearful nature. In
-many cases a quarter of the body is torn from the trunk, and either involves death,
-or a future of wretched incapacity and suffering. The increase of mills in the
-country will, of course, extend these dreadful results, and it will be a great boon if
-they are brought under the legislature. I am convinced that by proper supervision
-of scutching mills a vast sacrifice of life and limb would be averted.”214
-What could possibly show better the character of the capitalist mode of production, than the
-necessity that exists for forcing upon it, by Acts of Parliament, the simplest appliances for
-maintaining cleanliness and health? In the potteries the Factory Act of 1864 “has whitewashed
-and cleansed upwards of 200 workshops, after a period of abstinence from any such cleaning, in
-many cases of 20 years, and in some, entirely,” (this is the “abstinence” of the capitalist!) “in
-which were employed 27,800 artisans, hitherto breathing through protracted days and often nights
-of labour, a mephitic atmosphere, and which rendered an otherwise comparatively innocuous
-occupation, pregnant with disease and death. The Act has improved the ventilation very much.”215
-At the same time, this portion of the Act strikingly shows that the capitalist mode of production,
-owing to its very nature, excludes all rational improvement beyond a certain point. It has been
-stated over and over again that the English doctors are unanimous in declaring that where the
-work is continuous, 500 cubic feet is the very least space that should be allowed for each person.
-Now, if the Factory Acts, owing to their compulsory provisions, indirectly hasten on the
-conversion of small workshops into factories, thus indirectly attacking the proprietary rights of
-the smaller capitalists, and assuring a monopoly to the great ones, so, if it were made obligatory
-to provide the proper space for each workman in every workshop, thousands of small employers
-would, at one full swoop, be expropriated directly! The very root of the capitalist mode of
-production, i.e., the self-expansion of all capital, large or small, by means of the “free” purchase
-and consumption of labour-power, would be attacked. Factory legislation is therefore brought to a
-deadlock before these 500 cubic feet of breathing space. The sanitary officers, the industrial
-inquiry commissioners, the factory inspectors, all harp, over and over again, upon the necessity
-for those 500 cubic feet, and upon the impossibility of wringing them out of capital. They thus, in
-fact, declare that consumption and other lung diseases among the workpeople are necessary
-conditions to the existence of capital.216
-Paltry as the education clauses of the Act appear on the whole, yet they proclaim elementary
-education to be an indispensable condition to the employment of children.217 The success of those
-clauses proved for the first time the possibility of combining education and gymnastics218 with
-316 Chapter 15
-manual labour, and, consequently, of combining manual labour with education and gymnastics.
-The factory inspectors soon found out by questioning the schoolmasters, that the factory children,
-although receiving only one half the education of the regular day scholars, yet learnt quite as
-much and often more.
-“This can be accounted for by the simple fact that, with only being at school for
-one half of the day, they are always fresh, and nearly always ready and willing to
-receive instruction. The system on which they work, half manual labour, and half
-school, renders each employment a rest and a relief to the other; consequently,
-both are far more congenial to the child, than would be the case were he kept
-constantly at one. It is quite clear that a boy who has been at school all the
-morning, cannot (in hot weather particularly) cope with one who comes fresh and
-bright from his work.”219
-Further information on this point will be found in Senior’s speech at the Social Science Congress
-at Edinburgh in 1863. He there shows, amongst other things, how the monotonous and uselessly
-long school hours of the children of the upper and middle classes, uselessly add to the labour of
-the teacher, “while he not only fruitlessly but absolutely injuriously, wastes the time, health, and
-energy of the children.”220 From the Factory system budded, as Robert Owen has shown us in
-detail, the germ of the education of the future, an education that will, in the case of every child
-over a given age, combine productive labour with instruction and gymnastics, not only as one of
-the methods of adding to the efficiency of production, but as the only method of producing fully
-developed human beings.
-Modern industry, as we have seen, sweeps away by technical means the manufacturing division
-of labour, under which each man is bound hand and foot for life to a single detail-operation. At
-the same time, the capitalistic form of that industry reproduces this same division of labour in a
-still more monstrous shape; in the factory proper, by converting the workman into a living
-appendage of the machine; and everywhere outside the Factory, partly by the sporadic use of
-machinery and machine workers,221 partly by re-establishing the division of labour on a fresh
-basis by the general introduction of the labour of women and children, and of cheap unskilled
-labour.
-The antagonism between the manufacturing division of labour and the methods of modern
-industry makes itself forcibly felt. It manifests itself, amongst other ways, in the frightful fact that
-a great part of the children employed in modern factories and manufactures, are from their earliest
-years riveted to the most simple manipulations, and exploited for years, without being taught a
-single sort of work that would afterwards make them of use, even in the same manufactory or
-factory. In the English letter-press printing trade, for example, there existed formerly a system,
-corresponding to that in the old manufactures and handicrafts, of advancing the apprentices from
-easy to more and more difficult work. They went through a course of teaching till they were
-finished printers. To be able to read and write was for every one of them a requirement of their
-trade. All this was changed by the printing machine. It employs two sorts of labourers, one grown
-up, renters, the other, boys mostly from 11 to 17 years of age whose sole business is either to
-spread the sheets of paper under the machine, or to take from it the printed sheets. They perform
-this weary task, in London especially, for 14, 15, and 16 hours at a stretch, during several days in
-the week, and frequently for 36 hours, with only 2 hours’ rest for meals and sleep.222 A great part
-of them cannot read, and they are, as a rule, utter savages and very extraordinary creatures.
-“To qualify them for the work which they have to do, they require no intellectual
-training; there is little room in it for skill, and less for judgment; their wages,
-though rather high for boys, do not increase proportionately as they grow up, and
-317 Chapter 15
-the majority of them cannot look for advancement to the better paid and more
-responsible post of machine minder, because while each machine has but one
-minder, it has at least two, and often four boys attached to it.”223
-As soon as they get too old for such child’s work, that is about 17 at the latest, they are
-discharged from the printing establishments. They become recruits of crime. Several attempts to
-procure them employment elsewhere, were rendered of no avail by their ignorance and brutality,
-and by their mental and bodily degradation.
-As with the division of labour in the interior of the manufacturing workshops, so it is with the
-division of labour in the interior of society. So long as handicraft and manufacture form the
-general groundwork of social production, the subjection of the producer to one branch
-exclusively, the breaking up of the multifariousness of his employment224 is a necessary step in
-the development. On that groundwork each separate branch of production acquires empirically
-the form that is technically suited to it, slowly perfects it, and, so soon as a given degree of
-maturity has been reached, rapidly crystallises that form. The only thing, that here and there
-causes a change, besides new raw material supplied by commerce, is the gradual alteration of the
-instruments of labour. But their form, too, once definitely settled by experience, petrifies, as is
-proved by their being in many cases handed down in the same form by one generation to another
-during thousands of years. A characteristic feature is, that, even down into the eighteenth century,
-the different trades were called “mysteries” (mystères);225 into their secrets none but those duly
-initiated could penetrate. modern industry rent the veil that concealed from men their own social
-process of production, and that turned the various, spontaneously divided branches of production
-into so many riddles, not only to outsiders, but even to the initiated. The principle which it
-pursued, of resolving each process into its constituent movements, without any regard to their
-possible execution by the hand of man, created the new modern science of technology. The
-varied, apparently unconnected, and petrified forms of the industrial processes now resolved
-themselves into so many conscious and systematic applications of natural science to the
-attainment of given useful effects. Technology also discovered the few main fundamental forms
-of motion, which, despite the diversity of the instruments used, are necessarily taken by every
-productive action of the human body; just as the science of mechanics sees in the most
-complicated machinery nothing but the continual repetition of the simple mechanical powers.
-Modern industry never looks upon and treats the existing form of a process as final. The technical
-basis of that industry is therefore revolutionary, while all earlier modes of production were
-essentially conservative.226 By means of machinery, chemical processes and other methods, it is
-continually causing changes not only in the technical basis of production, but also in the functions
-of the labourer, and in the social combinations of the labour-process. At the same time, it thereby
-also revolutionises the division of labour within the society, and incessantly launches masses of
-capital and of workpeople from one branch of production to another. But if modern industry, by
-its very nature, therefore necessitates variation of labour, fluency of function, universal mobility
-of the labourer, on the other hand, in its capitalistic form, it reproduces the old division of labour
-with its ossified particularisations. We have seen how this absolute contradiction between the
-technical necessities of modern industry, and the social character inherent in its capitalistic form,
-dispels all fixity and security in the situation of the labourer; how it constantly threatens, by
-taking away the instruments of labour, to snatch from his hands his means of subsistence,227 and,
-by suppressing his detail-function, to make him superfluous. We have seen, too, how this
-antagonism vents its rage in the creation of that monstrosity, an industrial reserve army, kept in
-misery in order to be always at the disposal of capital; in the incessant human sacrifices from
-among the working-class, in the most reckless squandering of labour-power and in the
-318 Chapter 15
-devastation caused by a social anarchy which turns every economic progress into a social
-calamity. This is the negative side. But if, on the one hand, variation of work at present imposes
-itself after the manner of an overpowering natural law, and with the blindly destructive action of a
-natural law that meets with resistance228 at all points, modern industry, on the other hand, through
-its catastrophes imposes the necessity of recognising, as a fundamental law of production,
-variation of work, consequently fitness of the labourer for varied work, consequently the greatest
-possible development of his varied aptitudes. It becomes a question of life and death for society
-to adapt the mode of production to the normal functioning of this law. Modern Industry, indeed,
-compels society, under penalty of death, to replace the detail-worker of to-day, grappled by life-
-long repetition of one and the same trivial operation, and thus reduced to the mere fragment of a
-man, by the fully developed individual, fit for a variety of labours, ready to face any change of
-production, and to whom the different social functions he performs, are but so many modes of
-giving free scope to his own natural and acquired powers.
-One step already spontaneously taken towards effecting this revolution is the establishment of
-technical and agricultural schools, and of “écoles d’enseignement professionnel,” in which the
-children of the working-men receive some little instruction in technology and in the practical
-handling of the various implements of labour. Though the Factory Act, that first and meagre
-concession wrung from capital, is limited to combining elementary education with work in the
-factory, there can be no doubt that when the working-class comes into power, as inevitably it
-must, technical instruction, both theoretical and practical, will take its proper place in the
-working-class schools. There is also no doubt that such revolutionary ferments, the final result of
-which is the abolition of the old division of labour, are diametrically opposed to the capitalistic
-form of production, and to the economic status of the labourer corresponding to that form. But the
-historical development of the antagonisms, immanent in a given form of production, is the only
-way in which that form of production can be dissolved and a new form established. “Ne sutor
-ultra crepidam” – this nec plus ultra of handicraft wisdom became sheer nonsense, from the
-moment the watchmaker Watt invented the steam-engine, the barber Arkwright, the throstle, and
-the working-jeweller, Fulton, the steamship.229
-So long as Factory legislation is confined to regulating the labour in factories, manufactories, &c.,
-it is regarded as a mere interference with the exploiting rights of capital. But when it comes to
-regulating the so-called “home-labour,”230 it is immediately viewed as a direct attack on the patria
-potestas, on parental authority. The tender-hearted English Parliament long affected to shrink
-from taking this step. The force of facts, however, compelled it at last to acknowledge that
-modern industry, in overturning the economic foundation on which was based the traditional
-family, and the family labour corresponding to it, had also unloosened all traditional family ties.
-The rights of the children had to be proclaimed. The final report of the Ch. Empl. Comm. of
-1866, states:
-“It is unhappily, to a painful degree, apparent throughout the whole of the
-evidence, that against no persons do the children of both sexes so much require
-protection as against their parents.” The system of unlimited exploitation of
-children’s labour in general and the so-called home-labour in particular is
-"maintained only because the parents are able, without check or control, to
-exercise this arbitrary and mischievous power over their young and tender
-offspring.... Parents must not possess the absolute power of making their children
-mere ‘machines to earn so much weekly wage....’ The children and young
-persons, therefore, in all such cases may justifiably claim from the legislature, as a
-natural right, that an exemption should be secured to them, from what destroys
-319 Chapter 15
-prematurely their physical strength, and lowers them in the scale of intellectual
-and moral beings.”231
-It was not, however, the misuse of parental authority that created the capitalistic exploitation,
-whether direct or indirect, of children’s labour; but, on the contrary, it was the capitalistic mode
-of exploitation which, by sweeping away the economic basis of parental authority, made its
-exercise degenerate into a mischievous misuse of power. However terrible and disgusting the
-dissolution, under the capitalist system, of the old family ties may appear, nevertheless, modern
-industry, by assigning as it does an important part in the process of production, outside the
-domestic sphere, to women, to young persons, and to children of both sexes, creates a new
-economic foundation for a higher form of the family and of the relations between the sexes. It is,
-of course, just as absurd to hold the Teutonic-Christian form of the family to be absolute and final
-as it would be to apply that character to the ancient Roman, the ancient Greek, or the Eastern
-forms which, moreover, taken together form a series in historical development. Moreover, it is
-obvious that the fact of the collective working group being composed of individuals of both sexes
-and all ages, must necessarily, under suitable conditions, become a source of humane
-development; although in its spontaneously developed, brutal, capitalistic form, where the
-labourer exists for the process of production, and not the process of production for the labourer,
-that fact is a pestiferous source of corruption and slavery.232
-The necessity for a generalisation of the Factory Acts, for transforming them from an exceptional
-law relating to mechanical spinning and weaving – those first creations of machinery – into a law
-affecting social production as a whole, arose, as we have seen, from the mode in which modern
-industry was historically developed. In the rear of that industry, the traditional form of
-manufacture, of handicraft, and of domestic industry, is entirely revolutionised; manufactures are
-constantly passing into the factory system, and handicrafts into manufactures; and lastly, the
-spheres of handicraft and of the domestic industries become, in a, comparatively speaking,
-wonderfully short time, dens of misery in which capitalistic exploitation obtains free play for the
-wildest excesses. There are two circumstances that finally turn the scale: first, the constantly
-recurring experience that capital, so soon as it finds itself subject to legal control at one point,
-compensates itself all the more recklessly at other points;233 secondly, the cry of the capitalists for
-equality in the conditions of competition, i.e., for equal restrain on all exploitation of labour.234
-On this point let us listen to two heart-broken cries. Messrs. Cooksley of Bristol, nail and chain,
-&c., manufacturers, spontaneously introduced the regulations of the Factory Act into their
-business.
-“As the old irregular system prevails in neighbouring works, the Messrs. Cooksley
-are subject to the disadvantage of having their boys enticed to continue their
-labour elsewhere after 6 p.m. ‘This,’ they naturally say, ‘is an unjustice and loss to
-us, as it exhausts a portion of the boy’s strength, of which we ought to have the
-full benefit’.”235
-Mr. J. Simpson (paper box and bagmaker, London) states before the commissioners of the Ch.
-Empl. Comm.:
-“He would sign any petition for it” (legislative interference)... “As it was, he
-always felt restless at night, when he had closed his place, lest others should be
-working later than him and getting away his orders.”236
-Summarising, the Ch. Empl. Comm. says:
-“It would be unjust to the larger employers that their factories should be placed
-under regulation, while the hours of labour in the smaller places in their own
-320 Chapter 15
-branch of business were under no legislative restriction. And to the injustice
-arising from the unfair conditions of competition, in regard to hours, that would be
-created if the smaller places of work were exempt, would be added the
-disadvantage to the larger manufacturers, of finding their supply of juvenile and
-female labour drawn off to the places of work exempt from legislation. Further, a
-stimulus would be given to the multiplication of the smaller places of work, which
-are almost invariably the least favourable to the health, comfort, education, and
-general improvement of the people.” 237
-In its final report the Commission proposes to subject to the Factory Act more than 1,400,000
-children, young persons, and women, of which number about one half are exploited in small
-industries and by the so-called home-work.238 It says,
-“But if it should seem fit to Parliament to place the whole of that large number of
-children, young persons and females under the protective legislation above
-adverted to ... it cannot be doubted that such legislation would have a most
-beneficent effect, not only upon the young and the feeble, who are its more
-immediate objects, but upon the still larger body of adult workers, who would in
-all these employments, both directly and indirectly, come immediately under its
-influence. It would enforce upon them regular and moderate hours; it would lead
-to their places of work being kept in a healthy and cleanly state; it would therefore
-husband and improve that store of physical strength on which their own well-
-being and that of the country so much depends; it would save the rising generation
-from that overexertion at an early age which undermines their constitutions and
-leads to premature decay; finally, it would ensure them – at least up to the age of
-13 – the opportunity of receiving the elements of education, and would put an end
-to that utter ignorance ... so faithfully exhibited in the Reports of our Assistant
-Commissioners, and which cannot be regarded without the deepest pain, and a
-profound sense of national degradation.”239
-The Tory Cabinet240 announced in the Speech from the Throne, on February 5, 1867, that it had
-framed the proposals of the Industrial Commission of Inquiry241 into Bills. To get that far, another
-twenty years of experimentum in corpore vili had been required. Already in 1840 a Parliamentary
-Commission of Inquiry on the labour of children had been appointed. Its Report, in 1842,
-unfolded, in the words of Nassau W. Senior,
-“the most frightful picture of avarice, selfishness and cruelty on the part of
-masters and of parents, and of juvenile and infantile misery, degradation and
-destruction ever presented.... It may be supposed that it describes the horrors of a
-past age. But there is unhappily evidence that those horrors continue as intense as
-they were. A pamphlet published by Hardwicke about 2 years ago states that the
-abuses complained of in 1842, are in full bloom at the present day. It is a strange
-proof of the general neglect of the morals and health of the children of the
-working-class, that this report lay unnoticed for 20 years, during which the
-children, ‘bred up without the remotest sign of comprehension as to what is meant
-by the term morals, who had neither knowledge, nor religion, nor natural
-affection,’ were allowed to become the parents of the present generation.”242
-The social conditions having undergone a change, Parliament could not venture to shelve the
-demands of the Commission of 1862, as it had done those of the Commission of 1840. Hence in
-1864, when the Commission had not yet published more than a part of its reports, the earthenware
-industries (including the potteries), makers of paperhangings, matches, cartridges, and caps, and
-321 Chapter 15
-fustian cutters were made subject to the Acts in force in the textile industries. In the Speech from
-the Throne, on 5th February, 1867, the Tory Cabinet of the day announced the introduction of
-Bills, founded on the final recommendations of the Commission, which had completed its labours
-in 1866.
-On the 15th August, 1867, the Factory Acts Extension Act, and on the 21st August, the
-Workshops’ Regulation Act received the Royal Assent; the former Act having reference to large
-industries, the latter to small.
-The former applies to blast-furnaces, iron’ and copper mills, foundries, machine shops, metal
-manufactories, gutta-percha works, paper mills, glass-works, tobacco manufactories, letter-press
-printing (including newspapers), book-binding, in short to all industrial establishments of the
-above kind, in which 50 individuals or more are occupied simultaneously, and for not less than
-100 days during the year.
-To give an idea of the extent of the sphere embraced by the Workshops’ Regulation Act in its
-application, we cite from its interpretation clause, the following passages:
-“Handicraft shall mean any manual labour exercised by way of trade, or for
-purposes of gain in, or incidental to, the making any article or part of an article, or
-in, or incidental to, the altering, repairing, ornamenting, finishing, or otherwise
-adapting for sale any article.”
-“Workshop shall mean any room or place whatever in the open air or undercover,
-in which any handicraft is carried on by any child, young person, or woman, and
-to which and over which the person by whom such child, young person, or woman
-is employed, has the right of access and control.”
-“Employed shall mean occupied in any handicraft, whether for wages or not,
-under a master or under a parent as herein defined.”
-“Parent shall mean parent, guardian, or person, having the custody of, or control
-over, any... child or young person.”
-Clause 7, which imposes a penalty for employment of children, young persons, and women,
-contrary to the provisions of the Act, subjects to fines, not only the occupier of the workshop,
-whether parent or not, but even
-“the parent of, or the person deriving any direct benefit from the labour of, or
-having the control over, the child, young person or woman.”
-The Factory Acts Extension Act, which affects the large establishments, derogates from the
-Factory Act by a crowd of vicious exceptions and cowardly compromises with the masters.
-The Workshops’ Regulation Act, wretched in all its details, remained a dead letter in the hands of
-the municipal and local authorities who were charged with its execution. When, in 1871,
-Parliament withdrew from them this power, in order to confer it on the Factory Inspectors, to
-whose province it thus added by a single stroke more than one hundred thousand workshops, and
-three hundred brickworks, care was taken at the same time not to add more than eight assistants to
-their already undermanned staff.243
-What strikes us, then, in the English legislation of 1867, is, on the one hand, the necessity
-imposed on the parliament of the ruling classes, of adopting in principle measures so
-extraordinary, and on so great a scale, against the excesses of capitalistic exploitation; and on the
-other hand, the hesitation, the repugnance, and the bad faith, with which it lent itself to the task of
-carrying those measures into practice.
-322 Chapter 15
-The Inquiry Commission of 1862 also proposed a new regulation of the mining industry, an
-industry distinguished from others by the exceptional characteristic that the interests of landlord
-and capitalist there join hands. The antagonism of these two interests had been favourable to
-Factory legislation, while on the other hand the absence of that antagonism is sufficient to explain
-the delays and chicanery of the legislation on mines.
-The Inquiry Commission of 1840 had made revelations so terrible, so shocking, and creating such
-a scandal all over Europe, that to salve its conscience Parliament passed the Mining Act of 1842,
-in which it limited itself to forbidding the employment underground in mines of children under 10
-years of age and females.
-Then another Act, The Mines’ Inspecting Act of 1860, provides that mines shall be inspected by
-public officers nominated specially for that purpose, and that boys between the ages of 10 and 12
-years shall not be employed, unless they have a school certificate, or go to school for a certain
-number of hours. This Act was a complete dead letter owing to the ridiculously small number of
-inspectors, the meagreness of their powers, and other causes that will become apparent as we
-proceed.
-One of the most recent Blue books on mines is the “Report from the Select Committee on Mines,
-together with &c. Evidence, 23rd July, 1866.” This Report is the work of a Parliamentary
-Committee selected from members of the House of Commons, and authorised to summon and
-examine witnesses. It is a thick folio volume in which the Report itself occupies only five lines to
-this effect; that the committee has nothing to say, and that more witnesses must be examined!
-The mode of examining the witnesses reminds one of the cross-examination of witnesses in
-English courts of justice, where the advocate tries, by means of impudent, unexpected, equivocal
-and involved questions, put without connexion, to intimidate, surprise, and confound the witness,
-and to give a forced meaning to the answers extorted from him. In this inquiry the members of the
-committee themselves are the cross-examiners, and among them are to be found both mine-
-owners and mine exploiters; the witnesses are mostly working coal miners. The whole farce is too
-characteristic of the spirit of capital, not to call for a few extracts from this Report. For the sake of
-conciseness I have classified them. I may also add that every question and its answer are
-numbered in the English Blue books.
-1. Employment in mines of boys of 10 years and upwards. – In the mines the work, inclusive
-of going and returning, usually lasts 14 or 15 hours, sometimes even from 3, 4 and 5 o’clock a.m.,
-till 5 and 6 o’clock p.m. (n. 6, 452, 83). The adults work in two shifts, of eight hours each; but
-there is no alternation with the boys, on account of the expense (n. 80, 203, 204). The younger
-boys are chiefly employed in opening and shutting the ventilating doors in the various parts of the
-mine; the older ones are employed on heavier work, in carrying coal, &c. (n. 122, 739, 1747).
-They work these long hours underground until their 18th or 22nd year, when they are put to
-miner’s work proper (n. 161). Children and young persons are at present worse treated, and
-harder worked than at any previous period (n. 1663-1667). The miners demand almost
-unanimously an act of Parliament prohibiting the employment in mines of children under 14. And
-now Hussey Vivian (himself an exploiter of mines) asks:
-“Would not the opinion of the workman depend upon the poverty of the
-workman’s family?” Mr. Bruce: “Do you not think it would be a very hard case,
-where a parent had been injured, or where he was sickly, or where a father was
-dead, and there was only a mother, to prevent a child between 12 and 14 earning
-1s. 7d. a day for the good of the family? ... You must lay down a general rule? ...
-Are you prepared to recommend legislation which would prevent the employment
-of children under 12 and 14, whatever the state of their parents might be?” “Yes.”
-323 Chapter 15
-(ns. 107-110). Vivian: “Supposing that an enactment were passed preventing the
-employment of children under the age of 14, would it not be probable that ... the
-parents of children would seek employment for their children in other directions,
-for instance, in manufacture?” “Not generally I think” (n. 174). Kinnaird: “Some
-of the boys are keepers of doors?” “Yes.” “Is there not generally a very great
-draught every time you open a door or close it?” “Yes, generally there is.” “It
-sounds a very easy thing, but it is in fact rather a painful one?” “He is imprisoned
-there just the same as if he was in a cell of a gaol.” Bourgeois Vivian: “Whenever
-a boy is furnished with a lamp cannot he read?” “Yes, he can read, if he finds
-himself in candles.... I suppose he would be found fault with if he were discovered
-reading; he is there to mind his business, he has a duty to perform, and he has to
-attend to it in the first place, and I do not think it would be allowed down the pit.”
-(ns. 139, 141, 143, 158, 160).
-II. Education. – The working miners want a law for the compulsory education of their children,
-as in factories. They declare the clauses of the Act of 1860, which require a school certificate to
-be obtained before employing boys of 10 and 12 years of age, to be quite illusory. The
-examination of the witnesses on this subject is truly droll.
-“Is it (the Act) required more against the masters or against the parents?” “It is
-required against both I think.” “You cannot say whether it is required against one
-more than against the other?” “No; I can hardly answer that question.” (ns. 115,
-116). “Does there appear to be any desire on the part of the employers that the
-boys should have such hours as to enable them to go to school?” “No; the hours
-are never shortened for that purpose.” (n. 137) Mr. Kinnaird: “Should you say that
-the colliers generally improve their education; have you any instances of men who
-have, since they began to work, greatly improved their education, or do they not
-rather go back, and lose any advantage that they may have gained?” “They
-generally become worse: they do not improve; they acquire bad habits; they get on
-to drinking and gambling and such like, and they go completely to wreck.” (n.
-211.) “Do they make any attempt of the kind (for providing instruction) by having
-schools at night?” “There are few collieries where night schools are held, and
-perhaps at those collieries a few boys do go to those schools; but they are so
-physically exhausted that it is to no purpose that they go there.” (n. 454.) “You are
-then,” concludes the bourgeois, “against education?” “Most certainly not; but,”
-&c. (n. 443.) “But are they (the employers) not compelled to demand them
-(school certificates)?” “By law they are; but I am not aware that they are
-demanded by the employers.” “Then it is your opinion, that this provision of the
-Act as to requiring certificates, is not generally carried out in the collieries?” “It is
-not carried out.” (ns. 443, 444.) “Do the men take a great interest in this question
-(of education)?” “The majority of them do.” (n. 717.) “Are they very anxious to
-see the law enforced?” “The majority are.” (n. 718.) “Do you think that in this
-country any law that you pass ... can really be effectual unless the population
-themselves assist in putting it into operation?” “Many a man might wish to object
-to employing a boy, but he would perhaps become marked by it.” (n. 720.)
-“Marked by whom?” “By his employers.” (n. 721.) “Do you think that the
-employers would find any fault with a man who obeyed the law... ?” “I believe
-they would.” (n. 722.) “Have you ever heard of any workman objecting to employ
-a boy between 10 and 12, who could not write or read?” “It is not left to men’s
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-option.” (n. 123.) “Would you call for the interference of Parliament?” “I think
-that if anything effectual is to be done in the education of the colliers’ children, it
-will have to be made compulsory by Act of Parliament.” (n. 1634.) “Would you
-lay that obligation upon the colliers only, or all the workpeople of Great Britain?”
-“I came to speak for the colliers.” (n. 1636.) “Why should you distinguish them
-(colliery boys) from other boys?” “Because I think they are an exception to the
-rule.” (n. 1638.) “In what respect?” “In a physical respect.” (n. 1639.) “Why
-should education be more valuable to them than to other classes of lads?” “I do
-not know that it is more valuable; but through the over-exertion in mines there is
-less chance for the boys that are employed there to get education, either at Sunday
-schools, or at day schools.” (n. 1640.) “It is impossible to look at a question of this
-sort absolutely by itself?” (n. 1644.) “Is there a sufficiency of schools?” – “No"...
-(n. 1646). “If the State were to require that every child should be sent to school,
-would there be schools for the children to go to?” “No; but I think if the
-circumstances were to spring up, the schools would be forthcoming.” (n. 1647.)
-“Some of them (the boys) cannot read and write at all, I suppose?” “The majority
-cannot... The majority of the men themselves cannot.” (ns. 705, 725.)
-III. Employment of women. – Since 1842 women are no more employed underground, but are
-occupied on the surface in loading the coal, &c., in drawing the tubs to the canals and railway
-waggons, in sorting, &c. Their numbers have considerably increased during the last three or four
-years. (n. 1727.) They are mostly the wives, daughters, and widows of the working miners, and
-their ages range from 12 to 50 or 60 years. (ns. 645, 1779.)
-“What is the feeling among the working miners as to the employment of women?”
-“I think they generally condemn it.” (n. 648.) “What objection do you see to it?”
-“I think it is degrading to the sex.” (n. 649.) “There is a peculiarity of dress?”
-“Yes ... it is rather a man’s dress, and I believe in some cases, it drowns all sense
-of decency.” “Do the women smoke?” “Some do.” “And I suppose it is very dirty
-work?” “Very dirty.” “They get black and grimy?” “As black as those who are
-down the mines ... I believe that a woman having children (and there are plenty on
-the banks that have) cannot do her duty to her children.” (ns. 650-654, 701.) “Do
-you think that those widows could get employment anywhere else, which would
-bring them in as much wages as that (from 8s. to 10s. a week)?” “I cannot speak
-to that.” (n. 709.) “You would still be prepared, would you,” (flint-hearted
-fellow!) “to prevent their obtaining a livelihood by these means?” “I would.” (n.
-710.) “What is the general feeling in the district ... as to the employment of
-women?” “The feeling is that it is degrading; and we wish as miners to have more
-respect to the fair sex than to see them placed on the pit bank... Some part of the
-work is very hard; some of these girls have raised as much as 10 tons of stuff a
-day.” (ns. 1715,1717.) “Do you think that the women employed about the
-collieries are less moral than the women employed in the factories?” “. ..the
-percentage of bad ones may be a little more ... than with the girls in the factories.”
-(n. 1237.) “But you are not quite satisfied with the state of morality in the
-factories?” “No.” (n. 1733.) “Would you prohibit the employment of women in
-factories also?” “No, I would not.” (n. 1734.) “Why not?” “I think it a more
-honourable occupation for them in the mills.” (n. 1735.) “Still it is injurious to
-their morality, you think?” “Not so much as working on the pit bank; but it is
-more on the social position I take it; I do not take it on its moral ground alone. The
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-degradation, in its social bearing on the girls, is deplorable in the extreme. When
-these 400 or 500 girls become colliers’ wives, the men suffer greatly from this
-degradation, and it causes them to leave their homes and drink.” (n. 1736.) “You
-would be obliged to stop the employment of women in the ironworks as well,
-would you not, if you stopped it in the collieries?” “I cannot speak for any other
-trade.” (n. 1737.) “Can you see any difference in the circumstances of women
-employed in ironworks, and the circumstances of women employed above ground
-in collieries?” “I have not ascertained anything as to that.” (n. 1740.) “Can you see
-anything that makes a distinction between one class and the other?” “I have not
-ascertained that, but I know from house to house visitation, that it is a deplorable
-state of things in our district....” (n. 1741.) “Would you interfere in every case
-with the employment of women where that employment was degrading?” “It
-would become injurious, I think, in this way: the best feelings of Englishmen have
-been gained from the instruction of a mother. ...” (n. 1750.) “That equally applies
-to agricultural employments, does it not?” “Yes, but that is only for two seasons,
-and we have work all the four seasons.” (n. 1751.) “They often work day and
-night, wet through to the skin, their constitution undermined and their health
-ruined.” “You have not inquired into that subject perhaps?” “I have certainly
-taken note of it as I have gone along, and certainly I have seen nothing parallel to
-the effects of the employment of women on the pit bank.... It is the work of a
-man... a strong man.” (ns. 1753, 1793, 1794.) “Your feeling upon the whole
-subject is that the better class of colliers who desire to raise themselves and
-humanise themselves, instead of deriving help from the women, are pulled down
-by them?” “Yes.” (n. 1808.) After some further crooked questions from these
-bourgeois, the secret of their “sympathy” for widows, poor families, &c., comes
-out at last. “The coal proprietor appoints certain gentlemen to take the oversight of
-the workings, and it is their policy, in order to receive approbation, to place things
-on the most economical basis they can, and these girls are employed at from 1s.
-up to 1s. 6d. a day, where a man at the rate of 2s. 6d. a day would have to be
-employed.” (n. 1816.)
-IV. Coroner’s inquests. –
-“With regard to coroner’s inquests in your district, have the workmen confidence
-in the proceedings at those inquests when accidents occur?” “No; they have not.”
-(n. 360.) “Why not?” “Chiefly because the men who are generally chosen, are
-men who know nothing about mines and such like.” “Are not workmen
-summoned at all upon the juries?” “Never but as witnesses to my knowledge.”
-“Who are the people who are generally summoned upon these juries?” “Generally
-tradesmen in the neighbourhood ... from their circumstances they are sometimes
-liable to be influenced by their employers ... the owners of the works. They are
-generally men who have no knowledge, and can scarcely understand the witnesses
-who are called before them, and the terms which are used and such like.” “Would
-you have the jury composed of persons who had been employed in mining?”
-“Yes, partly... they (the workmen) think that the verdict is not in accordance with
-the evidence given generally.” (ns. 361, 364, 366, 368, 371, 375.) “One great
-object in summoning a jury is to have an impartial one, is it not?” “Yes, I should
-think so.” “Do you think that the juries would be impartial if they were composed
-to a considerable extent of workmen?” “I cannot see any motive which the
-326 Chapter 15
-workmen would have to act partially ... they necessarily have a better knowledge
-of the operations in connexion with the mine.” “You do not think there would be a
-tendency on the part of the workmen to return unfairly severe verdicts?” “No, I
-think not.” (ns. 378, 379, 380.)
-V. False weights and measures. – The workmen demand to be paid weekly instead of
-fortnightly, and by weight instead of by cubical contents of the tubs; they also demand protection
-against the use of false weights, &c. (n. 1071.)
-“If the tubs were fraudulently increased, a man could discontinue working by
-giving 14 days’ notice?” “But if he goes to another place, there is the same thing
-going on there.” (n. 1071.) “But he can leave that place where the wrong has been
-committed?” “It is general; wherever he goes, he has to submit to it.” (n. 1072.)
-“Could a man leave by giving 14 days’ notice?” “Yes.” (n. 1073.) And yet they
-are not satisfied!
-VI. Inspection of mines. – Casualties from explosions are not the only things the workmen suffer
-from. (n. 234, sqq.)
-“Our men complained very much of the bad ventilation of the collieries ... the
-ventilation is so bad in general that the men can scarcely breathe; they are quite
-unfit for employment of any kind after they have been for a length of time in
-connexion with their work; indeed, just at the part of the mine where I am
-working, men have been obliged to leave their employment and come home in
-consequence of that ... some of them have been out of work for weeks just in
-consequence of the bad state of the ventilation where there is not explosive gas ...
-there is plenty of air generally in the main courses, yet pains are not taken to get
-air into the workings where men are working.” “Why do you not apply to the
-inspector?” “To tell the truth there are many men who are timid on that point;
-there have been cases of men being sacrificed and losing their employment in
-consequence of applying to the inspector.” “Why is he a marked man for having
-complained?” “Yes...... And he finds it difficult to get employment in another
-mine?” “Yes.” “Do you think the mines in your neighbourhood are sufficiently
-inspected to insure a compliance with the provisions of the Act?” “No; they are
-not inspected at all ... the inspector has been down just once in the pit, and it has
-been going seven years.... In the district to which I belong there are not a
-sufficient number of inspectors. We have one old man more than 70 years of age
-to inspect more than 130 collieries.” “You wish to have a class of sub-
-inspectors?” “Yes.” (ns. 234, 241, 251, 254, 274, 275, 554, 276, 293.) “But do you
-think it would be possible for Government to maintain such an army of inspectors
-as would be necessary to do all that you want them to do, without information
-from the men?” “No, I should think it would be next to impossible....” “It would
-be desirable the inspectors should come oftener?” “Yes, and without being sent
-for.” (n. 280, 277.) “Do you not think that the effect of having these inspectors
-examining the collieries so frequently would be to shift the responsibility (!) of
-supplying proper ventilation from the owners of the collieries to the Government
-officials?” “No, I do not think that, I think that they should make it their business
-to enforce the Acts which are already in existence.” (n. 285.) “When you speak of
-sub-inspectors, do you mean men at a less salary, and of an inferior stamp to the
-present inspectors?” “I would not have them inferior, if you could get them
-otherwise.” (n. 294.) “Do you merely want more inspectors, or do you want a
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-lower class of men as an inspector?” “A man who would knock about, and see
-that things are kept right; a man who would not be afraid of himself.” (n. 295.) “If
-you obtained your wish in getting an inferior class of inspectors appointed, do you
-think that there would be no danger from want of skill, &c?” “I think not, I think
-that the Government would see after that, and have proper men in that position.”
-(n. 297.)
-This kind of examination becomes at last too much even for the chairman of the committee, and
-he interrupts with the observation:
-“You want a class of men who would look into all the details of the mine, and
-would go into all the holes and corners, and go into the real facts ... they would
-report to the chief inspector, who would then bring his scientific knowledge to
-bear on the facts they have stated?” (ns. 298, 299.) “Would it not entail very great
-expense if all these old workings were kept ventilated?” “Yes, expense might be
-incurred, but life would be at the same time protected.” (n. 531.)
-A working miner objects to the 17th section of the Act of 1860; he says,
-“At the present time, if the inspector of mines finds a part of the mine unfit to
-work in, he has to report it to the mine-owner and the Home Secretary. After
-doing that, there is given to the owner 20 days to look over the matter; at the end
-of 20 days he has the power to refuse making any alteration in the mine; but, when
-he refuses, the mine-owner writes to the Home Secretary, at the same time
-nominating five engineers, and from those five engineers named by the mine-
-owner himself, the Home Secretary appoints one, I think, as arbitrator, or appoints
-arbitrators from them; now we think in that case the mine-owner virtually
-appoints his own arbitrator.” (n. 581.)
-Bourgeois examiner, himself a mine-owner:
-“But ... is this a merely speculative objection?” (n. 586.) “Then you have a very
-poor opinion of the integrity of mining engineers?” “It is most certainly unjust and
-inequitable.” (n. 588.) “Do not mining engineers possess a sort of public
-character, and do not you think that they are above making such a partial decision
-as you apprehend?” “I do not wish to answer such a question as that with respect
-to the personal character of those men. I believe that in many cases they would act
-very partially indeed, and that it ought not to be in their hands to do so, where
-men’s lives are at stake.” (n. 589.)
-This same bourgeois is not ashamed to put this question: “Do you not think that the mine-owner
-also suffers loss from an explosion?” Finally, “Are not you workmen in Lancashire able to take
-care of your own interests without calling in the Government to help you?” “No.” (n. 1042.)
-In the year 1865 there were 3,217 coal mines in Great Britain, and 12 inspectors. A Yorkshire
-mine-owner himself calculates (Times, 26th January, 1867), that putting on one side their office
-work, which absorbs all their time, each mine can be visited but once in ten years by an inspector.
-No wonder that explosions have increased progressively, both in number and extent (sometimes
-with a loss of 200-300 men), during the last ten years. These are the beauties of “free” capitalist
-production! [This sentence has been added to the English text in conformity with the 4th German
-edition. – Ed.]
-The very defective Act, passed in 1872, is the first that regulates the hours of labour of the
-children employed in mines, and makes exploiters and owners, to a certain extent, responsible for
-so-called accidents.
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-The Royal Commission appointed in 1867 to inquire into the employment in agriculture of
-children, young persons, and women, has published some very important reports. Several
-attempts to apply the principles of the Factory Acts, but in a modified form, to agriculture have
-been made, but have so far resulted in complete failure. All that I wish to draw attention to here is
-the existence of an irresistible tendency towards the general application of those principles.
-If the general extension of factory legislation to all trades for the purpose of protecting the
-working-class both in mind and body has become inevitable, on the other hand, as we have
-already pointed out, that extension hastens on the general conversion of numerous isolated small
-industries into a few combined industries carried on upon a large scale; it therefore accelerates the
-concentration of capital and the exclusive predominance of the factory system. It destroys both
-the ancient and the transitional forms, behind which the dominion of capital is still in part
-concealed, and replaces them by the direct and open sway of capital; but thereby it also
-generalises the direct opposition to this sway. While in each individual workshop it enforces
-uniformity, regularity, order, and economy, it increases by the immense spur which the limitation
-and regulation of the working day give to technical improvement, the anarchy and the
-catastrophes of capitalist production as a whole, the intensity of labour, and the competition of
-machinery with the labourer. By the destruction of petty and domestic industries it destroys the
-last resort of the “redundant population,” and with it the sole remaining safety-valve of the whole
-social mechanism. By maturing the material conditions, and the combination on a social scale of
-the processes of production, it matures the contradictions and antagonisms of the capitalist form
-of production, and thereby provides, along with the elements for the formation of a new society,
-the forces for exploding the old one.244
-Section 10: Modern Industry and Agriculture
-The revolution called forth by modern industry in agriculture, and in the social relations of
-agricultural producers, will be investigated later on. In this place, we shall merely indicate a few
-results by way of anticipation. If the use of machinery in agriculture is for the most part free from
-the injurious physical effect it has on the factory operative, its action in superseding the labourers
-is more intense, and finds less resistance, as we shall see later in detail. In the counties of
-Cambridge and Suffolk, for example, the area of cultivated land has extended very much within
-the last 20 years (up to 1868), while in the same period the rural population has diminished, not
-only relatively, but absolutely. In the United States it is as yet only virtually that agricultural
-machines replace labourers; in other words, they allow of the cultivation by the farmer of a larger
-surface, but do not actually expel the labourers employed. In 1861 the number of persons
-occupied in England and Wales in the manufacture of agricultural machines was 1,034, whilst the
-number of agricultural labourers employed in the use of agricultural machines and steam-engines
-did not exceed 1,205.
-In the sphere of agriculture, modern industry has a more revolutionary effect than elsewhere, for
-this reason, that it annihilates the peasant, that bulwark of the old society, and replaces him by the
-wage-labourer. Thus the desire for social changes, and the class antagonisms are brought to the
-same level in the country as in the towns. The irrational, old-fashioned methods of agriculture are
-replaced by scientific ones. Capitalist production completely tears asunder the old bond of union
-which held together agriculture and manufacture in their infancy. But at the same time it creates
-the material conditions for a higher synthesis in the future, viz., the union of agriculture and
-industry on the basis of the more perfected forms they have each acquired during their temporary
-separation. Capitalist production, by collecting the population in great centres, and causing an
-ever-increasing preponderance of town population, on the one hand concentrates the historical
-329 Chapter 15
-motive power of society; on the other hand, it disturbs the circulation of matter between man and
-the soil, i.e., prevents the return to the soil of its elements consumed by man in the form of food
-and clothing; it therefore violates the conditions necessary to lasting fertility of the soil. By this
-action it destroys at the same time the health of the town labourer and the intellectual life of the
-rural labourer.245 But while upsetting the naturally grown conditions for the maintenance of that
-circulation of matter, it imperiously calls for its restoration as a system, as a regulating law of
-social production, and under a form appropriate to the full development of the human race. In
-agriculture as in manufacture, the transformation of production under the sway of capital, means,
-at the same time, the martyrdom of the producer; the instrument of labour becomes the means of
-enslaving, exploiting, and impoverishing the labourer; the social combination and organisation of
-labour-processes is turned into an organised mode of crushing out the workman’s individual
-vitality, freedom, and independence. The dispersion of the rural labourers over larger areas breaks
-their power of resistance while concentration increases that of the town operatives. In modern
-agriculture, as in the urban industries, the increased productiveness and quantity of the labour set
-in motion are bought at the cost of laying waste and consuming by disease labour-power itself.
-Moreover, all progress in capitalistic agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the
-labourer, but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time,
-is a progress towards ruining the lasting sources of that fertility. The more a country starts its
-development on the foundation of modern industry, like the United States, for example, the more
-rapid is this process of destruction. 246Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and
-the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original
-sources of all wealth-the soil and the labourer.
-1 Mill should have said, “of any human being not fed by other people’s labour,” for, without doubt,
-machinery has greatly increased the number of well-to-do idlers.
-2 See, for instance, Hutton: “Course of Mathematics.”
-3 “From this point of view we may draw a sharp line of distinction between a tool and a machine:
-spades, hammers, chisels, &c., combinations of levers and of screws, in all of which, no matter how
-complicated they may be in other respects, man is the motive power, ... all this falls under the idea of a
-tool; but the plough, which is drawn by animal power, and wind-mills, &c., must be classed among
-machines.” (Wilhelm Schulz: “Die Bewegung der Produktion.” Zürich, 1843, p. 38.) In many respects
-a book to be recommended.
-4 Before his time, spinning machines, although very imperfect ones, had already been used, and Italy
-was probably the country of their first appearance. A critical history of technology would show how
-little any of the inventions of the 18th century are the work of a single individual. Hitherto there is no
-such book. Darwin has interested us in the history of Nature’s Technology, i.e., in the formation of the
-organs of plants and animals, which organs serve as instruments of production for sustaining life.
-Does not the history of the productive organs of man, of organs that are the material basis of all social
-organisation, deserve equal attention? And would not such a history be easier to compile, since, as
-Vico says, human history differs from natural history in this, that we have made the former, but not
-the latter? Technology discloses man’s mode of dealing with Nature, the process of production by
-which he sustains his life, and thereby also lays bare the mode of formation of his social relations, and
-of the mental conceptions that flow from them. Every history of religion, even, that fails to take
-account of this material basis, is uncritical. It is, in reality, much easier to discover by analysis the
-earthly core of the misty creations of religion, than, conversely, it is, to develop from the actual
-relations of life the corresponding celestialised forms of those relations. The latter method is the only
-materialistic, and therefore the only scientific one. The weak points in the abstract materialism of
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-natural science, a materialism that excludes history and its process, are at once evident from the
-abstract and ideological conceptions of its spokesmen, whenever they venture beyond the bounds of
-their own speciality.
-5 Especially in the original form of the power-loom, we recognise, at the first glance, the ancient loom.
-In its modern form, the power-loom has undergone essential alterations.
-6 It is only during the last 15 years (i.e., since about 1850), that a constantly increasing portion of these
-machine tools have been made in England by machinery, and that not by the same manufacturers who
-make the machines. Instances of machines for the fabrication of these mechanical tools are, the
-automatic bobbin-making engine, the cardsetting engine, shuttle-making machines, and machines for
-forging mule and throstle spindles.
-7 Moses says: “Thou shalt not muzzle the ox that treads the corn.” The Christian philanthropists of
-Germany, on the contrary, fastened a wooden board round the necks of the serfs, whom they used as a
-motive power for grinding, in order to prevent them from putting flour into their mouths with their
-hands.
-8 It was partly the want of streams with a good fall on them, and partly their battles with
-superabundance of water in other respects, that compelled the Dutch to resort to wind as a motive
-power. The wind-mill itself they got from Germany, where its invention was the origin of a pretty
-squabble between the nobles, the priests, and the emperor, as to which of those three the wind
-“belonged.” The air makes bondage, was the cry in Germany, at the same time that the wind was
-making Holland free. What it reduced to bondage in this case, was not the Dutchman, but the land for
-the Dutchman. In 1836, 12,000 windmills of 6,000 horse-power were still employed in Holland, to
-prevent two-thirds of the land from being reconverted into morasses.
-9 It was, indeed, very much improved by Watt’s first so-called single acting engine; but, in this form,
-it continued to be a mere machine for raising water, and the liquor from salt mines.
-10 “The union of all these simple instruments, set in motion by a single motor, constitutes a machine.”
-(Babbage, l.c.)
-11 In January, 1861, John C. Morton read before the Society of Arts a paper on “The forces employed
-in agriculture.” He there states: “Every improvement that furthers the uniformity of the land makes the
-steam-engine more and more applicable to the production of pure mechanical force.... Horse-power is
-requisite wherever crooked fences and other obstructions prevent uniform action. These obstructions
-are vanishing day by day. For operations that demand more exercise of will than actual force, the only
-power applicable is that controlled every instant by the human mind-in other words, man-power.” Mr.
-Morton then reduces steam-power, horse-power, and man-power, to the unit in general use for steam-
-engines, namely, the force required to raise 33,000 lbs. one foot in one minute, and reckons the cost of
-one horse-power from a steam-engine to be 3d., and from a horse to be 5½d. per hour. Further, if a
-horse must fully maintain its health, it can work no more than 8 hours a day. Three at the least out of
-every seven horses used on tillage land during the year can be dispensed with by using steam-power,
-at an expense not greater than that which, the horses dispensed with, would cost during the 3 or 4
-months in which alone they can be used effectively. Lastly, steam-power, in those agricultural
-operations in which it can be employed, improves, in comparison with horse-power, the quality of the
-work. To do the work of a steam-engine would require 66 men, at a total cost of 15s. an hour, and to
-do the work of a horse, 32 men, at a total cost of 8s. an hour.
-12 Faulhaber, 1625; De Caus, 1688.
-13 The modern turbine frees the industrial exploitation of water-power from many of its former fetters.
-14 “In the early days of textile manufactures, the locality of the factory depended upon the existence of
-a stream having a sufficient fall to turn a water-wheel; and, although the establishment of the water-
-mills was the commencement of the breaking up of the domestic system of manufacture, yet the mills
-331 Chapter 15
-necessarily situated upon streams, and frequently at considerable distances the one from the other,
-formed part of a rural, rather than an urban system; and it was not until the introduction of the steam-
-power as a substitute for the stream that factories were congregated in towns, and localities where the
-coal and water required for the production of steam were found in sufficient quantities. The steam-
-engine is the parent of manufacturing towns.” (A. Redgrave in “Reports of the Insp. of Fact., 30th
-April, 1860,” p. 36.)
-15 From the standpoint of division of labour in Manufacture, weaving was not simple, but, on the
-contrary, complicated manual labour; and consequently the power-loom is a machine that does very
-complicated work. It is altogether erroneous to suppose that modern machinery originally appropriated
-those operations alone, which division of labour had simplified. Spinning and weaving were, during
-the manufacturing period, split up into new species, and the implements were modified and improved;
-but the labour itself was in no way divided, and it retained its handicraft character. It is not the labour,
-but the instrument of labour, that serves as the starting-point of the machine.
-16 Before the epoch of Mechanical Industry, the wool manufacture was the predominating
-manufacture in England. Hence it was in this industry that, in the first half of the 18th century, the
-most experiments were made. Cotton, which required less careful preparation for its treatment by
-machinery, derived the benefit of the experience gained on wool, just as afterwards the manipulation
-of wool by machinery was developed on the lines of cotton-spinning and weaving by machinery. It
-was only during the 10 years immediately preceding 1866, that isolated details of the wool
-manufacture, such as woolcombing, were incorporated in the factory system. “The application of
-power to the process of combing wool ... extensively in operation since the introduction of the
-combingmachine, especially Lister’s ... undoubtedly had the effect of throwing a very large number of
-men out of work. Wool was formerly combed by hand, most frequently in the cottage of the comber. It
-is now very generally combed in the factory, and hand-labour is superseded, except in some particular
-kinds of work, in which hand-combed wool is still preferred. Many of the hand-combers found
-employment in the factories, but the produce of the hand-combers bears so small a proportion to that
-of the machine, that the employment of a very large number of combers has passed away.” (“Rep. of
-lnsp. of Fact. for 31st Oct., 1856,” p. 16.)
-17 “The principle of the factory system, then, is to substitute ... the partition of a process into its
-essential constituents, for the division or graduation of labour among artisans.” (Andrew Ure: “The
-Philosophy of Manufactures,” Lond., 1835, p. 20.)
-18 The power-loom was at first made chiefly of wood; in its improved modern form it is made of iron.
-To what an extent the old forms of the instruments of production influenced their new forms at first
-starting, is shown by, amongst other things, the most superficial comparison of the present power-
-loom with the old one, of the modern blowing apparatus of a blast-furnace with the first inefficient
-mechanical reproduction of the ordinary bellows, and perhaps more strikingly than in any other way,
-by the attempts before the invention of the present locomotive, to construct a locomotive that actually
-had two feet, which after the fashion of a horse, it raised alternately from the ground. It is only after
-considerable development of the science of mechanics, and accumulated practical experience, that the
-form of a machine becomes settled entirely in accordance with mechanical principles, and
-emancipated from the traditional form of the tool that gave rise to it.
-19 Eli Whitney’s cotton gin had until very recent times undergone less essential changes than any other
-machine of the 18th century. It is only during the last decade (i.e., since 1856) that another American,
-Mr. Emery, of Albany, New York, has rendered Whitney’s gin antiquated by an improvement as
-simple as it is effective.
-20 “The Industry of Nations,” Lond., 1855, Part II., p. 239. This work also remarks: ‘Simple and
-outwardly unimportant as this appendage to lathes may appear, it is not, we believe, averring too much
-to state, that its influence in improving and extending the use of machinery has been as great as that
-332 Chapter 15
-produced by Watt’s improvements of the steam-engine itself. Its introduction went at once to perfect
-all machinery, to cheapen it, and to stimulate invention and improvement.”
-21 One of these machines, used for forging paddle-wheel shafts in London, is called “Thor.” It forges a
-shaft of 16½ tons with as much ease as a blacksmith forges a horseshoe.
-22 Wood-working machines that are also capable of being employed on a small scale are mostly
-American inventions.
-23 Science, generally speaking, costs the capitalist nothing, a fact that by no means hinders him from
-exploiting it. The science of others is as much annexed by capital as the labour of others. Capitalistic
-appropriation and personal appropriation, whether of science or of material wealth, are, however,
-totally different things. Dr. Ure himself deplores the gross ignorance of mechanical science existing
-among his dear machinery-exploiting manufacturers, and Liebig can a tale unfold about the
-astounding ignorance of chemistry displayed by English chemical manufacturers.
-24 Ricardo lays such stress on this effect of machinery (of which, in other connexions, he takes no
-more notice than he does of the general distinction between the labour process and the process of
-creating surplus-value), that he occasionally loses sight of the value given up by machines to the
-product, and puts machines on the same footing as natural forces. Thus “Adam Smith nowhere
-undervalues the services which the natural agents and machinery perform for us, but he very justly
-distinguishes the nature of the value which they add to commodities... as they perform their work
-gratuitously, the assistance which they afford us, adds nothing to value in exchange.” (Ric., l.c., pp.
-336, 337.) This observation of Ricardo is of course correct in so far as it is directed against J. B. Say,
-who imagines that machines render the “service” of creating value which forms a part of “profits.”
-25 A horse-power is equal to a force of 33,000 foot-pounds per minute, i.e., to a force that raises
-33,000 pounds one foot in a minute, or one pound 33,000 feet. This is the horse power meant in the
-text. In ordinary language, and also here and there in quotations in this work, a distinction is drawn
-between the “nominal” and the “commercial” or “indicated” horse-power of the same engine. The old
-or nominal horse-power is calculated exclusively from the length of piston-stroke, and the diameter of
-the cylinder, and leaves pressure of steam and piston speed out of consideration. It expresses
-practically this: This engine would be one of 50 horse-power, if it were driven with the same low
-pressure of steam, and the same slow piston speed, as in the days of Boulton and Watt. But the two
-latter factors have increased enormously since those days. In order to measure the mechanical force
-exerted today by an engine, an indicator has been invented which shows the pressure of the steam in
-the cylinder. The piston speed is easily ascertained. Thus the “indicated” or “commercial” horse-
-power of an engine is expressed by a mathematical formula, involving diameter of cylinder, length of
-stroke, piston speed, and steam pressure, simultaneously, and showing what multiple of 33,000
-pounds is really raised by the engine in a minute. Hence, one “nominal” horse-power may exert three,
-four, or even five “indicated” or “real” horse-powers. This observation is made for the purpose of
-explaining various citations in the subsequent pages. — F. E.
-26 The reader who is imbued with capitalist notions will naturally miss here the “interest” that the
-machine, in proportion to its capital value, adds to the product. It is, however, easily seen that since a
-machine no more creates new value than any other part of constant capital, it cannot add any value
-under the name of “interest.” It is also evident that here, where we are treating of the production of
-surplus-value, we cannot assume a priori the existence of any part of that value under the name of
-interest. The capitalist mode of calculating, which appears, primâ facie, absurd, and repugnant to the
-laws of the creation of value, will be explained in the third book of this work.
-27 This portion of value which is added by the machinery, decreases both absolutely and relatively,
-when the machinery does away with horses and other animals that are employed as mere moving
-forces, and not as machines for changing the form of matter. It may here be incidentally observed, that
-333 Chapter 15
-Descartes, in defining animals as mere machines, saw with eyes of the manufacturing period, while to
-eyes of the middle ages, animals were assistants to man, as they were later to Von Haller in his
-“Restauration der Staatswissenschaften.” That Descartes, like Bacon, anticipated an alteration in the
-form of production, and the practical subjugation of Nature by Man, as a result of the altered methods
-of thought, is plain from his “Discours de la Méthode.” He there says: “Il est possible (by the methods
-he introduced in philosophy) de parvenir à des connaissances fort utiles à la vie, et qu’au lieu de cette
-philosophie spéculative qu’on enseigne dans les écoles, on en peut trouver une pratique, par laquelle,
-connaissant la force et les actions du feu, de l’eau, de l’air, des astres, et de tous les autres corps qui
-nous environnent, aussi distinctement que nous connaissons les divers métiers de nos artisans, nous les
-pourrions employer en même façon à tous les usages auxquels ils sont propres, et ainsi nous rendre
-comme maîtres et possesseurs de la nature” and thus “contribuer au perfectionnement de la vie
-humaine.” [It is possible to attain knowledge very useful in life and, in place of the speculative
-philosophy taught in the schools, one can find a practical philosophy by which, given that we know
-the powers and the effectiveness of fire, water, air, the stars, and all the other bodies that surround us,
-as well and as accurately as we know the various trades of our craftsmen, we shall be able to employ
-them in the same manner as the latter to all uses to which they are adapted, and thus as it were make
-ourselves the masters and possessors of nature, and thus contributing to the perfection of human life.]
-In the preface to Sir Dudley North’s “Discourses upon Trade” (1691) it is stated, that Descartes’
-method had begun to free Political Economy from the old fables and superstitious notions of gold,
-trade, &c. On the whole, however, the early English economists sided with Bacon and Hobbes as their
-philosophers; while, at a later period, the philosopher [...] of Political Economy in England, France,
-and Italy, was Locke.
-28 According to the annual report (1863) of the Essen chamber of commerce, there was produced in
-1862, at the cast-steel works of Krupp, with its 161 furnaces, thirty-two steam-engines (in the year
-1800 this was about the number of all the steam-engines working in Manchester), and fourteen steam-
-hammers (representing in all 1,236 horse-power) forty-nine forges, 203 tool-machines, and about
-2,400 workmen ‒ thirteen million pounds of cast steel. Here there are not two workmen to each horse-
-power.
-29 Babbage estimates that in Java the spinning labour alone adds 117% to the value of the cotton. At
-the same period (1832) the total value added to the cotton by machinery and labour in the fine-
-spinning industry, amounted to about 33% of the value of the cotton. (“On the Economy of
-Machinery,” pp. 165, 166.)
-30 Machine printing also economises colour.
-31 See Paper read by Dr. Watson, Reporter on Products to the Government of India, before the Society
-of Arts, 17th April, 1860.
-32 “These mute agents (machines) are always the produce of much less labour than that which they
-displace, even when they are of the same money-value.” (Ricardo, l.c., p. 40.)
-33 Hence in a communistic society there would be a very different scope for the employment of
-machinery than there can be in a bourgeois society.
-34 “Employers of labour would not unnecessarily retain two sets of children under thirteen.... In fact
-one class of manufacturers, the spinners of woollen yarn, now rarely employ children under thirteen
-years of age, i.e., half-timers. They have introduced improved and new machinery of various kinds,
-which altogether supersedes the employment of children (i.e., under 13 years); f. i., I will mention one
-process as an illustration of this diminution in the number of children, wherein by the addition of an
-apparatus, called a piecing machine, to existing machines, the work of six or four half-timers,
-according to the peculiarity of each machine, can be performed by one young person (over 13 years)...
-334 Chapter 15
-the half-time system ‘stimulated’ the invention of the piecing machine.” (Reports of Insp. of Fact. for
-31st Oct., 1858.)
-35 “Wretch” is the recognised term in English Political Economy for the agricultural labourer.
-36 “Machinery ... can frequently not be employed until labour (he means wages) rises.” (Ricardo, l.c.,
-p. 479.)
-37 See “Report of the Social Science Congress, at Edinburgh.” Oct., 1863.
-38 Dr. Edward Smith, during the cotton crisis caused by the American Civil War, was sent by the
-English Government to Lancashire, Cheshire, and other places, to report on the sanitary condition of
-the cotton operatives. He reported, that from a hygienic point of view, and apart from the banishment
-of the operatives from the factory atmosphere, the crisis had several advantages. The women now had
-sufficient leisure to give their infants the breast, instead of poisoning them with “Godfrey’s cordial.”
-They had time to learn to cook. Unfortunately the acquisition of this art occurred at a time when they
-had nothing to cook. But from this we see how capital, for the purposes of its self-expansion, has
-usurped the labour necessary in the home of the family. This crisis was also utilised to teach sewing to
-the daughters of the workmen in sewing schools. An American revolution and a universal crisis, in
-order that the working girls, who spin for the whole world, might learn to sew!
-39 “The numerical increase of labourers has been great, through the growing substitution of female for
-male, and above all, of childish for adult labour. Three girls of 13, at wages of from 6 shillings to 8
-shillings a week, have replaced the one man of mature age, of wages varying from 18 shillings to 45
-shillings.” (Th. de Quincey: “The Logic of Political Econ.,” London, 1844. Note to p. 147.) Since
-certain family functions, such as nursing and suckling children, cannot be entirely suppressed, the
-mothers confiscated by capital, must try substitutes of some sort. Domestic work, such as sewing and
-mending, must be replaced by the purchase of ready-made articles. Hence, the diminished expenditure
-of labour in the house is accompanied by an increased expenditure of money. The cost of keeping the
-family increases, and balances the greater income. In addition to this, economy and judgment in the
-consumption and preparation of the means of subsistence becomes impossible. Abundant material
-relating to these facts, which are concealed by official Political Economy, is to be found in the Reports
-of the Inspectors of Factories, of the Children’s Employment Commission, and more especially in the
-Reports on Public Health.
-40 In striking contrast with the great fact, that the shortening of the hours of labour of women and
-children in English factories was exacted from capital by the male operatives, we find in the latest
-reports of the Children’s Employment Commission traits of the operative parents in relation to the
-traffic in children, that are truly revolting and thoroughly like slave-dealing. But the Pharisee of a
-capitalist, as may be seen from the same reports, denounces this brutality which he himself creates,
-perpetuates, and exploits, and which he moreover baptises “freedom of labour.” “Infant labour has
-been called into aid ... even to work for their own daily bread. Without strength to endure such
-disproportionate toil, without instruction to guide their future life, they have been thrown into a
-situation physically and morally polluted. The Jewish historian has remarked upon the overthrow of
-Jerusalem by Titus that it was no wonder it should have been destroyed, with such a signal
-destruction, when an inhuman mother sacrificed her own offspring to satisfy the cravings of absolute
-hunger.” (“Public Economy Concentrated.” Carlisle, 1833, p. 66.)
-41 A. Redgrave in “Reports of lnsp. of Fact. for 31st October, 1858,” pp. 40, 41.
-42 “Children’s Employment Commission, Fifth Report,” London, 1866, p. 81, n. 31. [Added in the 4th
-German edition. — The Bethnal Green silk industry is now almost destroyed. — F. E.]
-43 “Children’s Employment Commission, Third Report,” London, 1864, p. 53, n. 15.
-44 l.c., Fifth Report, p. 22, n. 137.
-335 Chapter 15
-45 “Sixth Report on Public Health,” Lond., 1864, p. 34.
-46 “It (the inquiry of 1861)... showed, moreover, that while, with the described circumstances, infants
-perish under the neglect and mismanagement which their mothers’ occupations imply, the mothers
-become to a grievous extent denaturalised towards their offspring ‒ commonly not troubling
-themselves much at the death, and even sometimes... taking direct measures to insure it.” (l.c.)
-47 l.c., p. 454.
-48 l.c., pp. 454-463. “Report by Dr. Henry Julian Hunter on the excessive mortality of infants in some
-rural districts of England.”
-49 l.c., p. 35 and pp. 455, 456.
-50 l.c., p. 456.
-51 In the agricultural as well as in the factory districts the consumption of opium among the grown-up
-labourers, both male and female, is extending daily. “To push the sale of opiate... is the great aim of
-some enterprising wholesale merchants. By druggists it is considered the leading article.” (l.c., p. 459.)
-Infants that take opiates “shrank up into little old men,” or “wizened like little monkeys.” (l.c., p. 460.)
-We here see how India and China avenged themselves on England.
-52 l.c., p. 37.
-53 “Rep. of Insp. of Fact. for 31st Oct., 1862,” p. 59. Mr. Baker was formerly a doctor.
-54 L. Horner in “Reports of Insp. of Fact. for 30th June, 1857,” p. 17.
-55 L. Horner in “Rep. of lnsp. of Fact. for 31st Oct., 1855,” pp. 18, 19.
-56 Sir John Kincaid in “Rep. of Insp. of Fact. for 31st Oct., 1858,” pp. 31, 32.
-57 L. Horner in “Reports, &c., for 31st Oct., 1857,” pp. 17, 18.
-58 Sir J. Kincaid in “Reports, &c., 31st Oct., 1856,” p. 66
-59 A. Redgrave in “Rep. of Insp. of Fact., 31st. Oct., 1857,” pp. 41-42. In those industries where the
-Factory Act proper (not the Print Works Act referred to in the text) has been in force for some time,
-the obstacles in the way of the education clauses have, in recent years, been overcome. In industries
-not under the Act, the views of Mr. J. Geddes, a glass manufacturer, still extensively prevail. He
-informed Mr. White, one of the Inquiry Commissioners: “As far as I can see, the greater amount of
-education which a part of the working-class has enjoyed for some years past is an evil. It is dangerous,
-because it makes them independent.” (“Children’s Empl. Comm., Fourth Report,” Lond., 1865, p.
-253.)
-60 “Mr. E., a manufacturer ... informed me that he employed females exclusively at his power-looms ...
-gives a decided preference to married females, especially those who have families at home dependent
-on them for support; they are attentive, docile, more so than unmarried females, and are compelled to
-use their utmost exertions to procure the necessaries of life. Thus are the virtues, the peculiar virtues
-of the female character to be perverted to her injury – thus all that is most dutiful and tender in her
-nature is made a means of her bondage and suffering.” (Ten Hours’ Factory Bill. The Speech of Lord
-Ashley, March 15th, Lond., 1844, p. 20.)
-61 “Since the general introduction of machinery, human nature has been forced far beyond its average
-strength.” (Rob. Owen: “Observations on the Effects of the Manufacturing System,” 2nd Ed., London,
-1817.)
-62 The English, who have a tendency to look upon the earliest form of appearance of a thing as the
-cause of its existence, are in the habit of attributing the long hours of work in factories to the extensive
-kidnapping of children, practised by capitalists in the infancy of the factory system, on workhouses
-and orphanages, by means of which robbery, unresisting material for exploitation was procured. Thus,
-for instance, Ficiden, himself a manufacturer, says: “It is evident that the long hours of work were
-336 Chapter 15
-brought about by the circumstance of so great a number of destitute children being supplied from
-different parts of the country, that the masters were independent of the hands, and that having once
-established the custom by means of the miserable materials they had procured in this way, they could
-impose it on their neighbours with the greater facility.” (J. Ficiden: “The Curse of the Factory
-System,” Lond., 1836, p. I 1.) With reference to the labour of women, Saunders, the factory inspector,
-says in his report of 1844: “Amongst the female operatives there are some women who, for many
-weeks in succession, except for a few days, are employed from 6 a. m. till midnight, with less than 2
-hours for meals, so that on 5 days of the week they have only 6 hours left out of the 24, for going to
-and from their homes and resting in bed.”
-63 “Occasion... injury to the delicate moving parts of metallic mechanism by inaction.” (Ure, l.c., p.
-281.)
-64 The Manchester Spinner (Times, 26th Nov., 1862) before referred to says in relation to this subject:
-“It (namely, the “allowance for deterioration of machinery") is also intended to cover the loss which is
-constantly arising from the superseding of machines before they are worn out, by others of a new and
-better construction.”
-65 “It has been estimated, roughly, that the first individual of a newly-invented machine will cost about
-five times as much as the construction of the second.” (Babbage, l.c., p. 349.)
-66 “The improvements which took place not long ago in frames for making patent net were so great
-that a machine in good repair which had cost £1,200, sold a few years after for £60 ... improvements
-succeeded each other so rapidly, that machines which had never been finished were abandoned in the
-hands of their makers, because new improvements had superseded their utility.” (Babbage, l.c., p.
-233.) In these stormy, go-ahead times, therefore, the tulle manufacturers soon extended the working
-day, by means of double sets of hands, from the original 8 hours to 24.
-67 “It is self-evident, that, amid the ebbings and flowings of the markets and the alternate expansions
-and contractions of demand, occasions will constantly recur, in which the manufacturer may employ
-additional floating capital without employing additional fixed capital... if additional quantities of raw
-material can be worked up without incurring an additional expense for buildings and machinery.” (R.
-Torrens: “On Wages and Combination.” London, 1834, p. 64.)
-68 This circumstance is mentioned only for the sake of completeness, for I shall not consider the rate of
-profit, i.e., the ratio of the surplus-value to the total capital advanced, until I come to the third book.
-69 Senior, “Letters on the Factory Act.” London, 1837, pp. 13, 14.
-70 “The great proportion of fixed to circulating capital ... makes long hours of work desirable.” With
-the increased use of machinery, &c., “the motives to long hours of work will become greater, as the
-only means by which a large proportion of fixed capital can be made profitable.” (l.c., pp. 11-13.)
-“There are certain expenses upon a mill which go on in the same proportion whether the mill be
-running short or full time, as, for instance, rent rates, and taxes, insurance against fire, wages of
-several permanent servants, deterioration of machinery, with various other charges upon a
-manufacturing establishment, the proportion of which to profits increases as the production
-decreases.” (“Rep. of Insp. of Fact. for 31st Oct., 1862,” p. 19.)
-71 Why it is, that the capitalist, and also the political economists who are imbued with his views, are
-unconscious of this immanent contradiction, will appear from the first part of the third book.
-72 It is one of the greatest merits of Ricardo to have seen in machinery not only the means of
-producing commodities, but of creating a “redundant population.”
-73 F. Biese. “Die Philosophie des Aristoteles,” Vol. 2. Berlin, 1842, p. 408.
-74 I give below the translation of this poem by Stolberg, because it brings into relief, quite in the spirit
-of former quotations referring to division of labour, the antithesis between the views of the ancients
-337 Chapter 15
-and the moderns. “Spare the hand that grinds the corn, Oh, miller girls, and softly sleep. Let
-Chanticleer announce the morn in vain! Deo has commanded the work of the girls to be done by the
-Nymphs, and now they skip lightly over the wheels, so that the shaken axles revolve with their spokes
-and pull round the load of the revolving stones. Let us live the life of our fathers, and let us rest from
-work and enjoy the gifts that the Goddess sends us.”
-“Schonet der mahlenden Hand, o Müllerinnen, und schlafet
-Sanft! es verkünde der Hahn euch den Morgen umsonst!
-Däo hat die Arbeit der Midchen den Nymphen befohlen,
-Und itzt hüpfen sic leicht über die Räder dahin,
-Daß die erschütterten Achsen mit ihren Speichen sich wälzen,
-Und im Kreise die Last drehen des wälzenden Steins.
-Laßt uns leben das Leben der Väter, und laBt uns der Gaben
-Arbeitslos uns freun, welche die Göttin uns schenkt.”
-(Gedichte aus dem Griechischen übersetzt von Christian Graf zu Stolberg, Hamburg, 1782.)
-75 There are, of course, always differences, in the intensities of the labour in various industries. But
-these differences are, as Adam Smith has shown, compensated to a partial extent by minor
-circumstances, peculiar to each sort of labour. Labour-time, as a measure of value, is not, however,
-affected in this case, except in so far as the duration of labour, and the degree of its intensity, are two
-antithetical and mutually exclusive expressions for one and the same quantity of labour.
-76 Especially by piece-work, a form we shall investigate in Part VI. of this book.
-77 See “Rep. of lnsp. of Fact. for 31st October, 1865.”
-78 Rep. of Insp. of Fact. for 1844 and the quarter ending 30th April, 1845, pp. 20-21.
-79 l.c., p. 19. Since the wages for piece-work were unaltered, the weekly wages depended on the
-quantity produced.
-80 l.c., p. 20.
-81 The moral element played an important part in the above experiments. The workpeople told the
-factory inspector: “We work with more spirit, we have the reward ever before us of getting away
-sooner at night, and one active and cheerful spirit pervades the whole mill, from the youngest piecer to
-the oldest hand, and we can greatly help each other.” (l.c., p. 21.)
-82 John Fielden, l.c., p. 32.
-83 Lord Ashley, l.c., pp. 6-9, passim.
-84 Rep. of Insp. of Fact. for Quarter ending 30th September, 1844, and from 1st October, 1844, to 30th
-April, 1845, p. 20.
-85 l.c., p. 22.
-86 “Rep. of lnsp. of Fact. for 31st October, 1862,” p. 62.
-87 This was altered in the “Parliamentary Return” of 1862. In it the actual horse-power of the modern
-steam engines and water wheels appears in place of the nominal. The doubling spindles, too, are no
-longer included in the spinning spindles (as was the case in the “Returns” of 1839, 1850, and 1856);
-further, in the case of woollen mills, the number of “gigs” is added, a distinction made between jute
-and hemp mills on the one hand and flax mills on the other, and finally stocking-weaving is for the
-first time inserted in the report.
-88 “Rep. of Insp. of Fact. for 31st October, 1856,” pp. 13-14, 20 and 1852, p. 23.
-89 l.c., pp. 14-15.
-90 l.c., p. 20.
-338 Chapter 15
-91 “Reports, &c., for 31st October, 1858,” pp. 9-10. Compare “Reports, &c., for 30th April, 1860,” p.
-30, sqq.
-92 “Reports of lnsp. of Fact. for 31st Oct., 1862,” pp. 100 and 130.
-93 On 2 modern power-looms a weaver now makes in a week of 60 hours 26 pieces of certain quality,
-length, and breadth; while on the old power-looms he could make no more than 4 such pieces. The
-cost of weaving a piece of such cloth had already soon after 1850 fallen from 2s. 9d. to 5 1/8d.
-“Thirty years ago (1841) one spinner with three placers was not required to attend to more than one
-pair of mules with 300-324 spindles. At the present time (1871) he has to mind with the help of 5
-piecers 2,200 spindles, and produces not less than seven times as much yarn as in 1841.” (Alex.
-Redgrave, Factory Inspector – in the Journal of Arts, 5th January, 1872.)
-94 “Rep. of Insp. of Fact. for 31st Oct., 1861,” pp. 25, 26.
-95 The agitation for a working day of 8 hours has now (1867) begun in Lancashire among the factory
-operatives.
-96 The following few figures indicate the increase in the “factories” of the United Kingdom since
-1848:
-Quantity
-Exported.
-1848.Quantity
-Exported.
-1851.Quantity
-Exported.
-1860.Quantity
-Exported.
-1865.COTTONCotton yarnlbs.
-135,831,162lbs.
-143,966,106lbs.
-197,343,655lbs.
-103,751,455Sewing thread—lbs.
-4,392,176lbs.
-6,297,554lbs.
-4,648,611Cotton clothyds.
-1,091,373,930yds.
-1,543,161,789yds.
-2,776,218,427yds.
-2,015,237,851FLAX & HEMPYarnlbs.
-11,722,182lbs.
-18,841,326lbs.
-31,210,612lbs.
-36,777,334Clothyds.
-88,901,519yds.
-129,106,753yds.
-143,996,773yds.
-247,012.529SILKYarnlbs.
-466,825lbs.
-462,513lbs.
-897,402lbs.
-812,589Cloth—yds.
-1,181,455yds.
-339 Chapter 15
-1,307,293yds.
-2,869,837WOOLWoollen and
-Worsted yarns—lbs.
-14,670,880lbs.
-27,533,968lbs.
-31,669,267Cloth—yds.
-151,231,153yds.
-190,371,507yds.
-278,837,418
-Value
-Exported.
-1848.
-£Value
-Exported.
-1851.
-£Value
-Exported.
-1860.
-£Value
-Exported.
-1865.
-£COTTONYarn5,927,8316,634,0269,870,87510,351,049Cloth16,753,369
-23,454,81042,141,50546,903,796FLAX &
-HEMPYarn493,449951,4261,801,2722,505,497Cloth2,802,7894,107,3964
-,804,8039,155,358SILKYarn77,789196,380826,107768,064Cloth—
-1,130,3981,587,3031,409,221WOOLYarn776,9751,484,5443,843,4505,42
-4,047Cloth5,733,8288,377,18312,156,99820,102,259See the Blue
-books “Statistical Abstract of the United Kingdom,” Nos. 8
-and 13. Lond., 1861 and 1866. In Lancashire the number of
-mills increased only 4 per cent. between 1839 and 1850; 19 per
-cent. between 1850 and 1856; and 33 per cent. between 1856
-and 1862; while the persons employed in them during each of
-the above periods of 11 years increased absolutely, but
-diminished relatively. (See “Rep. of Insp. of Fact., for 31st
-Oct., 1862,” p. 63.) The cotton trade preponderates in
-Lancashire. We may form an idea of the stupendous nature of
-the cotton trade in that district when we consider that, of the
-gross number of textile factories in the United Kingdom, it
-absorbs 45.2 per cent., of the spindles 83.3 per cent., of the
-power-looms 81.4 per cent., of the mechanical horse-power
-72.6 per cent., and of the total number of persons employed
-58.2 per cent. (l.c., pp. 62-63.)
-340 Chapter 15
-97 Ure, l.c., p. 18.
-98 Ure, l.c., P. 3 1. See Karl Marx, l.c., pp. 140-141.
-99 It looks very like intentional misleading by statistics (which misleading it would be possible to
-prove in detail in other cases too), when the English factory legislation excludes from its operation the
-class of labourers last mentioned in the text, while the parliamentary returns expressly include in the
-category of factory operatives, not only engineers, mechanics, &c., but also managers, salesmen,
-messengers, warehousemen, packers, &c., in short everybody, except the owner of the factory himself.
-100 Ure grants this. He says, “in case of need,” the workmen can be moved at the will of the manager
-from one machine to another, and he triumphantly exclaims: “Such a change is in flat contradiction
-with the old routine, that divides the labour, and to one workman assigns the task of fashioning the
-head of a needle, to another the sharpening of the point.” He had much better have asked himself, why
-this “old routine” is departed from in the automatic factory, only “in case of need. “
-101 When distress is very great, as, for instance, during the American Civil War, the factory operative
-is now and then set by the Bourgeois to do the roughest of work, such as road-making, &c.. The
-English “ateliers nationaux” [national workshops] of 1862 and the following years, established for the
-benefit of the destitute cotton operatives, differ from the French of 1848 in this, that in the latter the
-workmen had to do unproductive work at the expense of the state, in the former they had to do
-productive municipal work to the advantage of the bourgeois, and that, too, cheaper than the regular
-workmen, with whom they were thus thrown into competition. “The physical appearance of the cotton
-operatives is unquestionably improved. This I attribute ... as to the men, to outdoor labour on public
-works.” (“Rep. of Insp. of Fact., 31st Oct., 1863,” p. 59.) The writer here alludes to the Preston factory
-operatives, who were employed on Preston Moor.
-102 An example: The various mechanical apparatus introduced since the Act of 1844 into woollen
-mills, for replacing the labour of children. So soon as it shall happen that the children of the
-manufacturers themselves have to go through a course of schooling as helpers in the mill, this almost
-unexplored territory of mechanics will soon make remarkable progress. “Of machinery, perhaps self-
-acting mules are as dangerous as any other kind. Most of the accidents from them happen to little
-children, from their creeping under the mules to sweep the floor whilst the mules are in motion.
-Several ‘minders’ have been fined for this offence, but without much general benefit. If machine
-makers would only invent a self-sweeper, by whose use the necessity for these little children to creep
-under the machinery might be prevented, it would be a happy addition to our protective measures.”
-(“Reports of Insp. of Fact. for 31st. Oct., 1866,” p. 63.)
-103 So much then for Proudhon’s wonderful idea: he “construes” machinery not as a synthesis of
-instruments of labour, but as a synthesis of detail operations for the benefit of the labourer himself.
-104 F. Engels, l.c., p. 217. Even an ordinary and optimist Free-trader, like Mr. Molinari, goes so far as
-to say, “Un homme s’use plus vite en surveillant, quinze heures par jour, l’évolution uniforme d’un
-mécanisme, qu’en exercant, dans le même espace de temps, sa force physique. Ce travail de
-surveillance qui servirait peut-être d’utile gymnastique à l’intelligence, s’il n’était pas trop prolongé,
-détruit à la longue, par son excès, et l’intelligence, et le corps même.” [A man becomes exhausted
-more quickly when he watches over the uniform motion of mechanism for fifteen hours a day, than
-when he applies his physical strength over the same period of time. This labour of surveillance, which
-might perhaps serve as a useful exercise for the mind, if it did not go on too long, destroys both the
-mind and the body in the long run, through excessive application] (G. de Molinari: “Études
-Économiques.” Paris, 1846.)
-105 F. Engels, l.c., p. 216.
-341 Chapter 15
-106 “The Master Spinners’ and Manufacturers’ Defence Fund. Report of the Committee.” Manchester,
-1854, p. 17. We shall see hereafter, that the “master” can sing quite another song, when he is
-threatened with the loss of his “living” automaton.
-107 Ure, l.c., p. 15. Whoever knows the life history of Arkwright, will never dub this barber-genius
-“noble.” Of all the great inventors of the 18th century, he was incontestably the greatest thiever of
-other people’s inventions and the meanest fellow.
-108 “The slavery in which the bourgeoisie has bound the proletariat, comes nowhere more plainly into
-daylight than in the factory system. In it all freedom comes to an end both at law and in fact. The
-workman must be in the factory at half past five. If he come a few minutes late, he is punished; if he
-come 10 minutes late, he is not allowed to enter until after breakfast, and thus loses a quarter of a
-day’s wage. He must eat, drink and sleep at word of command.... The despotic bell calls him from his
-bed, calls him from breakfast and dinner. And how does he fare in the mill? There the master is the
-absolute law-giver. He makes what regulations he pleases; he alters and makes additions to his code at
-pleasure; and if he insert the veriest nonsense, the courts say to the workman: Since you have entered
-into this contract voluntarily, you must now carry it out .... These workmen are condemned to live,
-from their ninth year till their death, under this mental and bodily torture.” (F. Engels, l.c., p. 217, sq.)
-What, “the courts say,” I will illustrate by two examples. One occurs at Sheffield at the end of 1866.
-In that town a workman had engaged himself for 2 years in a steelworks. In consequence of a quarrel
-with his employer he left the works, and declared that under no circumstances would he work for that
-master any more. He was prosecuted for breach of contract, and condemned to two months’
-imprisonment. (If the master break the contract, he can be proceeded against only in a civil action, and
-risks nothing but money damages.) After the workman has served his two months, the master invites
-him to return to the works, pursuant to the contract. Workman says: No, he has already been punished
-for the breach. The master prosecutes again, the court condemns again, although one of the judges,
-Mr. Shee, publicly denounces this as a legal monstrosity, by which a man can periodically, as long as
-he lives, be punished over and over again for the same offence or crime. This judgment was given not
-by the “Great Unpaid,” the provincial Dogberries, but by one of the highest courts of justice in
-London. — [Added in the 4th German edition. — This has now been done away with. With few
-exceptions, e.g., when public gas-works are involved, the worker in England is now put on an equal
-footing with the employer in case of breach of contract and can be sued only civilly. — F. E.] The
-second case occurs in Wiltshire at the end of November 1863. About 30 power-loom weavers, in the
-employment of one Harrup, a cloth manufacturer at Leower’s Mill, Westbury Leigh, struck work
-because master Harrup indulged in the agreeable habit of making deductions from their wages for
-being late in the morning; 6d. for 2 minutes; 1s. for 3 minutes, and 1s. 6d. for ten minutes. This is at
-the rate of 9s. per hour, and £4 10s. 0d. per diem; while the wages of the weavers on the average of a
-year, never exceeded 10s. to 12s. weekly. Harrup also appointed a boy to announce the starting time
-by a whistle, which he often did before six o’clock in the morning: and if the hands were not all there
-at the moment the whistle ceased, the doors were closed, and those hands who were outside were
-fined: and as there was no clock on the premises, the unfortunate hands were at the mercy of the
-young Harrup-inspired time-keeper. The hands on strike, mothers of families as well as girls, offered
-to resume work if the timekeeper were replaced by a clock, and a more reasonable scale of fines were
-introduced. Harrup summoned I9 women and girls before the magistrates for breach of contract. To
-the utter indignation of all present, they were each mulcted in a fine of 6d. and 2s. 6d. for costs.
-Harrup was followed from the court by a crowd of people who hissed him. A favourite operation with
-manufacturers is to punish the workpeople by deductions made from their wages on account of faults
-in the material worked on. This method gave rise in 1866 to a general strike in the English pottery
-districts. The reports of the Ch. Empl. Com. (1863-1866), give cases where the worker not only
-receives no wages, but becomes, by means of his labour, and of the penal regulations, the debtor to
-boot, of his worthy master. The late cotton crisis also furnished edifying examples of the sagacity
-342 Chapter 15
-shown by the factory autocrats in making deductions from wages. Mr. R. Baker, the Inspector of
-Factories, says, “I have myself had lately to direct prosecutions against one cotton mill occupier for
-having in these pinching and painful times deducted 10d. a piece from some of the young workers
-employed by him, for the surgeon’s certificate (for which he himself had only paid 6d.), when only
-allowed by the law to deduct 3d., and by custom nothing at all .... And I have been informed of
-another, who, in order to keep without the law, but to attain the same object, charges the poor children
-who work for him a shilling each, as a fee for learning them the art and mystery of cotton spinning, so
-soon as they are declared by the surgeon fit and proper persons for that occupation. There may
-therefore be undercurrent causes for such extraordinary exhibitions as strikes, not only wherever they
-arise, but particularly at such times as the present, which without explanation, render them
-inexplicable to the public understanding.” He alludes here to a strike of power-loom weavers at
-Darwen, June, 1863. (“Reports of Insp. of Fact. for 30 April, 1863,” pp. 50-51.) The reports always go
-beyond their official dates.
-109 The protection afforded by the Factory Acts against dangerous machinery has had a beneficial
-effect. “But ... there are other sources of accident which did not exist twenty years since; one
-especially, viz., the increased speed of the machinery. Wheels, rollers, spindles and shuttles are now
-propelled at increased and increasing rates; fingers must be quicker and defter in their movements to
-take up the broken thread, for, if placed with hesitation or carelessness, they are sacrificed.... A large
-number of accidents are caused by the eagerness of the workpeople to get through their work
-expeditiously. It must be remembered that it is of the highest importance to manufacturers that their
-machinery should be in motion, i.e., producing yarns and goods. Every minute’s stoppage is not only a
-loss of power, but of production, and the workpeople are urged by the overlookers, who are interested
-in the quantity of work turned off, to keep the machinery in motion, and it is no less important to those
-of the operatives who are paid by the weight or piece, that the machines should be kept in motion.
-Consequently, although it is strictly forbidden in many, nay in most factories, that machinery should
-be cleaned while in motion, it is nevertheless the constant practice in most, if not in all, that the
-workpeople do, unreproved, pick out waste, wipe rollers and wheels, &c., while their frames are in
-motion. Thus from this cause only, 906 accidents have occurred during the six months.... Although a
-great deal of cleaning is constantly going on day by day, yet Saturday is generally the day set apart for
-the thorough cleaning of the machinery, and a great deal of this is done while the machinery is in
-motion.” Since cleaning is not paid for, the workpeople seek to get done with it as speedily as
-possible. Hence “the number of accidents which occur on Fridays, and especially on Saturdays, is
-much larger than on any other day. On the former day the excess is nearly 12 per cent. over the
-average number of the four first days of the week, and on the latter day the excess is 25 per cent. over
-the average of the preceding five days; or, if the number of working-hours on Saturday being taken
-into account — 7½ hours on Saturday as compared with 10½ on other days — there is an excess of 65
-per cent. on Saturdays over the average of the other five days.” (“Rep. of Insp. of Fact., 31st Oct.,
-1866,” pp. 9, 15, 16, 17.)
-110 In Part I. of Book III. I shall give an account of a recent campaign by the English manufacturers
-against the Clauses in the Factory Acts that protect the “hands” against dangerous machinery. For the
-present, let this one quotation from the official report of Leonard Horner suffice: “I have heard some
-mill-owners speak with inexcusable levity of some of the accidents; such, for instance, as the loss of a
-finger being a trifling matter. A working-man’s living and prospects depend so much upon his fingers,
-that any loss of them is a very serious matter to him. When I have heard such inconsiderate remarks
-made, I have usually put this question: Suppose you were in want of an additional workman, and two
-were to apply, both equally well qualified in other respects, but one had lost a thumb or a forefinger,
-which would you engage? There never was a hesitation as to the answer....” The manufacturers have
-“mistaken prejudices against what they have heard represented as a pseudo-philanthropic legislation.”
-343 Chapter 15
-(“Rep. of Insp. of Fact., 31st Oct., 1855.") These manufacturers are clever folk, and not without reason
-were they enthusiastic for the slave-holders’ rebellion.
-111 In those factories that have been longest subject to the Factory Acts, with their compulsory
-limitation of the hours of labour, and other regulations, many of the older abuses have vanished. The
-very improvement of the machinery demands to a certain extent “improved construction of the
-buildings,” and this is an advantage to the workpeople. (See “Rep. of Insp. of Fact. for 31st Oct.,
-1863,” p. 109.)
-112 See amongst others, John Houghton: “Husbandry and Trade Improved.” London, 1727. “The
-Advantages of the East India Trade, 1720.” John Bellers, l.c. “The masters and their workmen are,
-unhappily, in a perpetual war with each other. The invariable object of the former is to get their work
-done as cheaply as possible; and they do not fail to employ every artifice to this purpose, whilst the
-latter are equally attentive to every occasion of distressing their masters into a compliance with higher
-demands.” (“An Enquiry into the Causes of the Present High Price of Provisions,” pp. 61-62. Author,
-the Rev. Nathaniel Forster, quite on the side of the workmen.)
-113 In old-fashioned manufactures the revolts of the workpeople against machinery, even to this day,
-occasionally assume a savage character, as in the case of the Sheffield file cutters in 1865.
-114 Sir James Steuart also understands machinery quite in this sense. “Je considère donc les machines
-comme des moyens d’augmenter (virtuellement) le nombre des gens industrieux qu’on n’est pas
-obligé de nourrir.... En quoi l’effet d’une machine diffère-t-il de celui de nouveaux habitants?”
-(French trans. t. I., l. I., ch. XIX.) More naïve is Petty, who says, it replaces “Polygamy.” The above
-point of view is, at the most, admissible only for some parts of the United States. On the other hand,
-“machinery can seldom be used with success to abridge the labour of an individual; more time would
-be lost in its construction than could be saved by its application. It is only really useful when it acts on
-great masses, when a single machine can assist the work of thousands. It is accordingly in the most
-populous countries, where there are most idle men, that it is most abundant.... It is not called into use
-by a scarcity of men, but by the facility with which they can be brought to work in masses.” (Piercy
-Ravenstone: “Thoughts on the Funding System and its Effects.” London, 1824, p. 45.)
-115 [Note in the 4th German edition. — This applies to Germany too. Where in our country agriculture
-on a large scale exists, hence particularly in the East, it has become possible only in consequence of
-the clearing of the estates (“Bauernlegen”), a practice which became widerspread in the 16th century
-and was particularly so since 1648. — F. E.]
-116 “Machinery and labour are in constant competition.” Ricardo, l.c., p. 479.
-117 The competition between hand-weaving and power-weaving in England, before the passing of the
-Poor Law of 1833, was prolonged by supplementing the wages, which had fallen considerably below
-the minimum, with parish relief. “The Rev. Mr. Turner was, in 1827, rector of Wilmslow in Cheshire,
-a manufacturing district. The questions of the Committee of Emigration, and Mr. Turner’s answers,
-show how the competition of human labour is maintained against machinery. ‘Question: Has not the
-use of the power-loom superseded the use of the hand-loom? Answer: Undoubtedly; it would have
-superseded them much more than it has done, if the hand-loom weavers were not enabled to submit to
-a reduction of wages.’ ‘Question: But in submitting he has accepted wages which are insufficient to
-support him, and looks to parochial contribution as the remainder of his support? Answer: Yes, and in
-fact the competition between the hand-loom and the power-loom is maintained out of the poor-rates.’
-Thus degrading pauperism or expatriation, is the benefit which the industrious receive from the
-introduction of machinery, to be reduced from the respectable and in some degree independent
-mechanic, to the cringing wretch who lives on the debasing bread of charity. This they call a
-temporary inconvenience.” (“A Prize Essay on the Comparative Merits of Competition and Co-
-operation.” Lond., 1834, p. 29.)
-344 Chapter 15
-118 “The same cause which may increase the revenue of the country” (i.e., as Ricardo explains in the
-same passage, the revenues of landlords and capitalists, whose wealth, from the economic point of
-view, forms the Wealth of the Nation), “may at the same time render the population redundant and
-deteriorate the condition of the labourer.” (Ricardo, l.c., p. 469.) “The constant aim and the tendency
-of every improvement in machinery is, in fact, to do away entirely with the labour of man, or to lessen
-its price by substituting the labour of women and children for that of grown-up men, or of unskilled
-for that of skilled workmen.” (Ure, l.c., t. I., p. 35.)
-119 “Rep. Insp. Fact. for 31st October, 1858,” p. 43.
-120 “Rep. lnsp. Fact. for 31st October, 1856,” p. 15.
-121 Ure, l.c., p. 19. “The great advantage of the machinery employed in brick-making consists in this,
-that the employer is made entirely independent of skilled labourers.” (“Ch. Empl. Comm. V. Report,”
-Lond., 1866, p. 130, n. 46.) Mr. A. Sturrock, superintendent of the machine department of the Great
-Northern Railway, says, with regard to the building of locomotives, &c.: “Expensive English
-workmen are being less used every day. The production of the workshops of England is being
-increased by the use of improved tools and these tools are again served by a low class of labour....
-Formerly their skilled labour necessarily produced all the parts of engines. Now the parts of engines
-are produced by labour with less skill, but with good tools. By tools, I mean engineer’s machinery,
-lathes, planing machines, drills, and so on.” (“Royal Com. on Railways,” Lond., 1867, Minutes of
-Evidence, n. 17, 862 and 17, 863.)
-122 Ure, l.c., p. 20.
-123 Ure, l.c., p. 321.
-124 Ure, l.c., p. 23.
-125 “Rep. Insp. Fact., 31st Oct., 1863,” pp. 108,109.
-126 l.c., p. 109. The rapid improvement of machinery, during the crisis, allowed the English
-manufacturers, immediately after the termination of the American Civil War, and almost in no time, to
-glut the markets of the world again. Cloth, during the last six months of 1866, was almost unsaleable.
-Thereupon began the consignment of goods to India and China, thus naturally making the glut more
-intense. At the beginning of 1867 the manufacturers resorted to their usual way out of the difficulty,
-viz., reducing wages 5 per cent. The workpeople resisted, and said that the only remedy was to work
-short time, 4 days a-week; and their theory was the correct one. After holding out for some time, the
-self-elected captains of industry had to make up their minds to short time, with reduced wages in some
-places, and in others without.
-127 “The relation of master and man in the blown-flint bottle trades amounts to a chronic strike.”
-Hence the impetus given to the manufacture of pressed glass, in which the chief operations are done
-by machinery. One firm in Newcastle, who formerly produced 350,000 lbs. of blown-flint glass, now
-produces in its place 3,000,500 lbs. of pressed glass. (“Ch. Empl. Comm., Fourth Rep.,” 1865, pp.
-262-263.)
-128 Gaskell. “The Manufacturing Population of England,” London, 1833, pp. 3, 4.
-129 W. Fairbairn discovered several very important applications of machinery to the construction of
-machines, in consequence of strikes in his own workshops.
-130 Ure, l.c., pp. 368-370
-131 Ure, l.c., pp. 368, 7, 370, 280, 281, 321, 370, 475.
-132 Ricardo originally was also of this opinion, but afterwards expressly disclaimed it with the
-scientific impartiality and love of truth characteristic of him. See l.c., ch. xxxi. “On Machinery.”
-133 Nota bene. My illustration is entirely on the lines of those given by the above named economists.
-345 Chapter 15
-134 A disciple of Ricardo, in answer to the insipidities of J. B. Say, remarks on this point: “Where
-division of labour is well developed, the skill of the labourer is available only in that particular branch
-in which it has been acquired; he himself is a sort of machine. It does not therefore help matters one
-jot, to repeat in parrot fashion, that things have a tendency to find their level. On looking around us we
-cannot but see, that they are unable to find their level for a long time; and that when they do find it,
-the level is always lower than at the commencement of the process.” (“An Inquiry into those
-Principles Respecting the Nature of Demand,” &c., Lond. 1821, p. 72.)
-135 MacCulloch, amongst others, is a past master in this pretentious cretinism. “If,” he says, with the
-affected naïveté of a child of 8 years, “if it be advantageous, to develop the skill of the workman more
-and more, so that he is capable of producing, with the same or with a less quantity of labour, a
-constantly increasing quantity of commodities, it must also be advantageous, that he should avail
-himself of the help of such machinery as will assist him most effectively in the attainment of this
-result.” (MacCulloch: “Princ. of Pol. Econ.,” Lond. 1830, p. 166.)
-136 “The inventor of the spinning machine has ruined India, a fact, however, that touches us but little.”
-A. Thiers: De la propriété. — M. Thiers here confounds the spinning machine with the power-loom,
-“a fact, however, that touches us but little.”
-137 According to the census of 1861 (Vol. II., Lond., 1863), the number of people employed in coal
-mines in England and Wales, amounted to 246,613 of which 73,545 were under, and 173,067 were
-over 20 years. Of those under 20, 835 were between 5 and 10 years, 30,701 between 10 and 15 years,
-42,010 between 15 and 19 years. The number employed in iron, copper, lead, tin, and other mines of
-every description, was 319, 222.
-138 In England and Wales, in 1861, there were employed in making machinery, 60,807 persons,
-including the masters and their clerks, &c., also all agents and business people connected with this
-industry, but excluding the makers of small machines, such as sewing-machines, &c., as also the
-makers of the operative parts of machines, such as spindles. The total number of civil engineers
-amounted to 3,329.
-139 Since iron is one of the most important raw materials; let me here state that, in 1861, there were in
-England and Wales 125,771 operative iron founders, of whom 123,430 were males, 2,341 females. Of
-the former 30,810 were under, and 92,620 over 20 years.
-140 “A family of four grown-up persons, with two children as winders, earned at the end of the last,
-and the beginning of the present century, by ten hours’ daily labour, £4 a week. If the work was very
-pressing, they could earn more.... Before that, they had always suffered from a deficient supply of
-yarn.” (Gaskell, l.c., pp. 25-27.)
-141 F. Engels, in “Lage, &c.,” points out the miserable condition of a large number of those who work
-on these very articles of luxury. See also numerous instances in the “Reports of the Children’s
-Employment Commission.”
-142 In 1861, in England and Wales, there were 94,665 sailors in the merchant service.
-143 Of these only 177,596 are males above 13 years of age.
-144 Of these, 30,501 are females.
-145 Of these, 137,447 males. None are included in the 1,208,648 who do not serve in private houses.
-Between 1861 and 1870 the number of male servants nearly doubled itself. It increased to 267,671. In
-the year 1847 there were 2,694 gamekeepers (for the landlords’ preserves), in 1869 there were 4,921.
-The young servant girls in the houses of the London lower middle class are in common parlance called
-“slaveys.”
-146 Ganilh, on the contrary, considers the final result of the factory system to be an absolutely less
-number of operatives, at whose expense an increased number of “gens honnêtes” live and develop
-346 Chapter 15
-their well-known “perfectibilité perfectible.” Little as he understands the movement of production, at
-least he feels, that machinery must needs be a very fatal institution, if its introduction converts busy
-workmen into paupers, and its development calls more slaves of labour into existence than it has
-suppressed. It is not possible to bring out the cretinism of his standpoint, except by his own words:
-“Les classes condamnées à produire et à consommer diminuent, et les classes qui dirigent le travail,
-qui soulagent, consolent, et éclairent toute la population, se multiplient ... et s’approprient tous les
-bienfaits qui résultent de la diminution des frais du travail, de l’abondance des productions, et du bon
-marché des consommations. Dans cette direction, l’espéce humaine s’élève aux plus hautes
-conceptions du génie, pénètre dans les profoundeurs mystérieuses de la religion, établit les principes
-salutaires de la morale (which consists in ‘s’approprier tous les beinfaits,’ &c.), les lois tutélaires de la
-liberté (liberty of ‘les classes condamnées à produire?’) et du pouvoir, de l’obéissance et de la justice,
-du devoir et de la l’humanité.” [The classes condemned to produce and to consume diminish, and the
-classes which direct labour, which relieve, console and enlighten the whole population, multiply ...
-and appropriate all the benefits which result from the diminution of the costs of labour, from the
-abundance of products and the cheapness of consumer goods. In this way, the human species rises to
-the highest creations of genius, penetrates the mysterious depths of religion, and establishes the
-salutory principles of morality, the laws for the protection of liberty, and power, of obedience and
-justice, of obligation and humanity] For this twaddle, see “Des Systèmes d’Economie Politique, &c.,
-Par M. Ch. Ganilh,” 2ème ed., Paris, 1821, t. I, p. 224, and see p. 212.
-147 “Reports of Insp. of Fact., 31 Oct., 1865,” p. 58, sq. At the same time, however, means of
-employment for an increased number of hands was ready in 110 new mills with 11,625 looms,
-628,576 spindles and 2,695 total horse-power of steam and water (l.c.).
-148 “Reports, &c., for 31 Oct., 1862,” p. 79. At the end of 1871, Mr. A. Redgrave, the factory
-inspector, in a lecture given at Bradford, in the New Mechanics’ Institution, said: “What has struck me
-for some time past is the altered appearance of the woollen factories. Formerly they were filled with
-women and children, now machinery seems to do all the work. At my asking for an explanation of this
-from a manufacturer, he gave me the following: ‘Under the old system I employed 63 persons; after
-the introduction of improved machinery I reduced my hands to 33, and lately, in consequence of new
-and extensive alterations, I have been in a position to reduce those 33 to 13’.”
-149 See “Reports, &c., 31 Oct., 1856,” p. 16.
-150 “The sufferings of the hand-loom weavers were the subject of an inquiry by a Royal Commission,
-but although their distress was acknowledged and lamented, the amelioration of their condition was
-left, and probably necessarily so, to the chances and changes of time, which it may now be hoped” [20
-years later!] “have nearly obliterated those miseries, and not improbably by the present great extention
-of the power-loom.” (“Rep. Insp. of Fact., 31 Oct., 1856,” p. 15.)
-151 Other ways in which machinery affects the production of raw material will be mentioned in the
-third book.
-152
-EXPORT OF COTTON FROM INDIA TO GREAT BRITAIN.1846. —34,540,143
-lbs.1860. —204,141,168 lbs.1865. —445,947,600 lbs.EXPORT OF WOOL FROM
-INDIA TO GREAT BRITAIN.1846. —4,570,581 lbs.1860. —20,214,173 lbs.1865. —
-20,679,111 lbs.
-153
-EXPORT OF WOOL FROM THE CAPE TO GREAT BRITAIN.1846. —2,958,457
-lbs.1860. —16,574,345 lbs.1865. —29,920,623 lbs.EXPORT OF WOOL FROM
-347 Chapter 15
-AUSTRALIA TO GREAT BRITAIN.1846. —21,789,346 lbs.1860. —59,166,616
-lbs.1865. —109,734,261 lbs.
-154 The economic development of the United States is itself a product of European, more especially of
-English modern industry. In their present form (1866) the States must still be considered a European
-colony. [Added in the 4th German edition. — “Since then they have developed into country whose
-industry holds second place in the world, without on that account entirely losing their colonial
-character.” — F. E.]
-EXPORT OF COTTON FROM THE UNITED STATES TO GREAT BRITAIN1846. —
-401,949,393 lbs.1852. —765,630,543 lbs.1859. —961,707,264 lbs.1860. —
-1,115,890,608 lbs.
-EXPORT OF CORN, &c., FROM THE UNITED STATES TO GREAT BRITAIN
-1862Wheat, cwts16,202,31241,033,503Barley, cwts3,669,6536,624,800Oats,
-cwts3,174,8014,496,994Rye, cwts388,7497,108Flour,
-cwts3,819,4407,207,113Buckwheat, cwts1,05419,571Maize,
-cwts5,473,16111,694,818Bere or Bigg (a sort of Barley), cwts2,0397,675Peas,
-cwts811,6201,024,722Beans, cwts1,822,9722,037,137Total exports—74,083,441
-155 In an appeal made in July, 1866, to the Trade Societies of England, by the shoemakers of Leicester,
-who had been thrown on the streets by a lock-out, it is stated: “Twenty years ago the Leicester shoe
-trade was revolutionised by the introduction of riveting in the place of stitching. At that time good
-wages could be earned. Great competition was shown between the different firms as to which could
-turn out the neatest article. Shortly afterwards, however a worse kind of competition sprang up,
-namely, that of underselling one another in the market. The injurious consequences soon manifested
-themselves in reductions of wages, and so sweepingly quick was the fall in the price of labour, that
-many firms now pay only one half of the original wages. And yet, though wages sink lower and lower,
-profits appear, with each alteration in the scale of wages, to increase.” Even bad times are utilised by
-the manufacturers, for making exceptional profits by excessive lowering of wages, i.e., by a direct
-robbery of the labourer’s means of subsistence. One example (it has reference to the crisis in the
-Coventry silk weaving): “From information I have received from manufacturers as well as workmen,
-there seems to be no doubt that wages have been reduced to a greater extent than either the
-competition of the foreign producers, or other circumstances have rendered necessary ... the majority
-of weavers are working at a reduction of 30 to 40 per cent. in their wages. A piece of ribbon for
-making which the weaver got 6s. or 7s. five years back, now only brings them 3s. 3d. or 3s. 6d.; other
-work is now priced at 2s. and 2s. 3d. which was formerly priced at 4s. and 4s. 3d. The reduction in
-wage seems to have been carried to a greater extent than is necessary for increasing demand. Indeed,
-the reduction in the cost of weaving, in the case of many descriptions of ribbons, has not been
-accompanied by any corresponding reduction in the selling price of the manufactured article.” (Mr. F.
-D. Longe’s Report. “Ch. Emp. Com., V. Rep., 1866,” p. 114, 1.)
-156 Conf “Reports of Insp. of Fact., 31st October, 1862,” p. 30.
-157 l.c., p. 19.
-158 “Rep. Insp. of Fact., 31st October, 1863,” pp. 41-45.
-159 l.c., pp. 41-42
-160 l.c., p. 57.
-161 l.c., pp. 50-51.
-162 l.c., pp. 62-63.
-348 Chapter 15
-163 “Rep. &c., 30th April, 1864,” p. 27.
-164 From a letter of Mr. Harris, Chief Constable of Bolton, in “Rep. of Insp. of Fact., 31st October,
-1865,” pp. 61-62.
-165 In an appeal, dated 1863, of the factory operatives of Lancashire, &c., for the purpose of forming a
-society for organised emigration, we find the following: “That a large emigration of factory workers is
-now absolutely essential to raise them from their present prostrate condition, few will deny; but to
-show that a continuous stream of emigration is at all times demanded, and, without which it is
-impossible for than to maintain their position in ordinary times, we beg to call attention to the
-subjoined facts: — In 1814 the official value of cotton goods exported was £17,665,378, whilst the
-real marketable value was £20,070,824. In 1858 the official value of cotton goods exported, was
-£182,221,681; but the real or marketable value was only £43,001,322, being a ten-fold quantity sold
-for little more than double the former price. To produce results so disadvantageous to the country
-generally, and to the factory workers in particular, several causes have co-operated, which, had
-circumstances permitted, we should have brought more prominently under your notice; suffice it for
-the present to say that the most obvious one is the constant redundancy of labour, without which a
-trade so ruinous in its effects never could have been carried on, and which requires a constantly
-extending market to save it from annihilation. Our cotton mills may be brought to a stand by the
-periodical stagnations of trade, which, under present arrangements, are as inevitable as death itself; but
-the human mind is constantly at work, and although we believe we are under the mark in stating that
-six millions of persons have left these shores during the last 25 years, yet, from the natural increase of
-population, and the displacement of labour to cheapen production, a large percentage of the male
-adults in the most prosperous times find it impossible to obtain work in factories on any conditions
-whatever.” (“Reports of Insp. of Fact., 30th April 1863,” pp. 51-52.) We shall, in a later chapter, see
-how our friends, the manufacturers, endeavoured, during the catastrophe in the cotton trade, to prevent
-by every means, including State interference, the emigration of the operatives.
-166 “Ch. Empt. Comm. III. Report, 1864,” p. 108, n. 447.
-167 In the United States the restoration, in this way, of handicrafts based on machinery is frequent; and
-therefore, when the inevitable transition to the factory system shall take place, the ensuing
-concentration will, compared with Europe and even with England, stride on in seven-league boots.
-168 See “Rep. of Insp. of Fact., 31st Oct., 1865,” p. 64.
-169 Mr. Gillott erected in Birmingham the first steel-pen factory on a large scale. It produced, so early
-as 1851, over 180,000,000 of pens yearly, and consumed 120 tons of steel. Birmingham has the
-monopoly of this industry in the United Kingdom, and at present produces thousands of millions of
-steel-pens. According to the Census of 1861, the number of persons employed was 1,428, of whom
-1,268 females from 5 years of age upwards.
-170 “Ch. Empl. Comm. II. Rep. 1864,” p. LXVIII., n. 415.
-171 And now forsooth children are employed at file-cutting in Sheffield.
-172 “Ch. Empl. Comm., V. Rep. 1866,” p. 3, n. 24; p. 6, n. 55, 56; p. 7, n. 59, 60.
-173 l.c., pp. 114, 115, n. 6, 7. The commissioner justly remarks that though as a rule machines take the
-place of men, here literally young persons replace machines.
-174 See the Report on the rag trade, and numerous details in “Public Health, VIII. Rep.” Lond. 1866,
-app., pp. 196, 208.
-175 “Ch. Empl. Comm. V. Rep., 1866,” pp. xvi-xviii, n. 86-97, and pp. 130-133, n. 39-71. See also III.
-Rep., 1864, pp. 48, 56.
-176 “Public Health. Sixth Rep.,” Lond. 1864, pp. 29, 31.
-349 Chapter 15
-177 l.c., p. 30. Dr. Simon remarks that the mortality among the London tailors and printers between the
-ages of 25 and 35 is in fact much greater, because the employers in London obtain from the country a
-great number of young people up to 30 years of age, as “apprentices” and “improvers,” who come for
-the purpose of being perfected in their trade. These figure in the census as Londoners, they swell out
-the number of heads on which the London death-rate is calculated, without adding proportionally to
-the number of deaths in that place. The greater part of them in fact return to the country, and
-especially in cases of severe illness. (l.c.)
-178 I allude here to hammered nails, as distinguished from nails cut out and made by machinery. See
-“Child. Empl. Comm., Third Rep.,” pp. xi., xix., n. 125-130, p. 52, n. 11, p. 114, n. 487, p. 137, n.
-674.
-179 “Ch. Empl. Comm., II. Rep.,” p. xxii, n. 166.
-180 “Ch. Empl. Comm., II. Rep., 1864,” pp. xix., xx., xxi.
-181 l.c., pp. xxi.. xxii.
-182 l.c., pp. xxix., xxx.
-183 l.c., pp. xi., xii.
-184 “Child. Empl. Comm., I. Rep. 1863,” p. 185.
-185 In England millinery and dressmaking are for the most part carried on, on the premises of the
-employer, partly by workwomen who live there, partly by women who live off the premises.
-186 Mr. White, a commissioner, visited a military clothing manufactory that employed 1,000 to 1,200
-persons, almost all females, and a shoe manufactory with 1,300 persons; of these nearly one half were
-children and young persons.
-187 An instance. The weekly report of deaths by the Registrar-General dated 26th Feb., 1864, contains
-5 cases of death from starvation. On the same day The Times reports another case. Six victims of
-starvation in one week!
-188 “Child. Empl. Comm., Second Rep., 1864,” p. lxvii., n. 406-9, p. 84, n. 124, p. lxxiii, n. 441, p. 68,
-n. 6, p. 84, n. 126, p. 78, n. 85, p. 76, n. 69, p. lxxii, n. 483.
-189 “The rental of premises required for workrooms seems the element which ultimately determines
-the point; and consequently it is in the metropolis, that the old system of giving work out to small
-employers and families has been longest retained, and earliest returned to.” (l.c., p. 83, n. 123.) The
-concluding statement in this quotation refers exclusively to shoemaking.
-190 In glove-making and other industries where the condition of the work-people is hardly
-distinguishable from that of paupers, this does not occur.
-191 l.c., p. 83, n. 122.
-192 In the wholesale boot and shoe trade of Leicester alone, there were in 1864, 800 sewing-machines
-already in use.
-193 l.c., p. 84, n. 124.
-194 Instances: The Army Clothing Depot at Pimlico, London, the Shirt factory of Tillie and Henderson
-at Londonderry, and the clothes factory of Messrs. Tait at Limerick which employs about 1,200 hands.
-195 “Tendency to Factory System” (l.c., p. lxvii). “The whole employment is at this time in a state of
-transition, and is undergoing the same Change as that effected in the lace trade, weaving, &c.” (l.c., n.
-405.) “A complete revolution” (l.c., p. xlvi., n. 318). At the date of the Child. Empl. Comm. of 1840
-stocking making was still done by manual labour. Since 1846 various sorts of machines have been
-introduced, which are now driven by steam. The total number of persons of both sexes and of all ages
-from 3 years upwards, employed in stocking making in England, was in 1862 about 129,000. Of these
-350 Chapter 15
-only 4,063 were, according to the Parliamentary Return of the 11th February, 1862, working under the
-Factory Acts.
-196 Thus, e.g., in the earthenware trade, Messrs. Cochrane, of the Britain Pottery, Glasgow, report: “To
-keep up our quantity we have gone extensively into machines wrought by unskilled labour, and every
-day convinces us that we can produce a greater quantity than by the old method.” (“Rep. of Insp. of
-Fact., 31st Oct., 1865,” p. 13.) “The effect of the Fact. Acts is to force on the further introduction of
-machinery” (l.c., pp. 13-14).
-197 Thus, after the extension of the Factory Act to the potteries, great increase of powerjiggers in place
-of hand-moved jiggers.
-198 “Report of lnsp. of Fact., 31st Oct., 1865,” pp. 96 and 127.
-199 The introduction of this and other machinery into match-making caused in one department alone
-230 young persons to be replaced by 32 boys and girls of 14 to 17 years of age. This saving in labour
-was carried still further in 1865, by the employment of steam power.
-200 “Ch. Empl. Comm., 11. Rep., 1864,” p. ix., n. 50.
-201 “Rep. of Insp. of Fact., 31st Oct., 1865,” p..22.
-202 “But it must be borne in mind that those improvements, though carried out fully in some
-establishments, are by no means general, and are not capable of being brought into use in many of the
-old manufactories without an expenditure of capital beyond the means of many of the present
-occupiers.” “I cannot but rejoice,” writes Sub-Insp. May, “that notwithstanding the temporary
-disorganisation which inevitably follows the introduction of such a measure (as the Factory Act
-Extension Act), and is, indeed, directly indicative of the evils which it was intended to remedy, &c.”
-(Rep. of Insp. of Fact., 31st Oct., 1865.)
-203 With blast furnaces, for instance, “work towards the end of the week being generally much
-increased in duration in consequence of the habit of the men of idling on Monday and occasionally
-during a part or the whole of Tuesday also.” (“Child. Empl. Comm., III. Rep.,” p. vi.) “The little
-masters generally have very irregular hours. They lose two or three days, and then work all night to
-make it up.... They always employ their own children, if they have any.” (l.c., p. vii.) “The want of
-regularity in coming to work, encouraged by the possibility and practice of making up for this by
-working longer hours.” (l.c., p. xviii.) “In Birmingham ... an enormous amount of time is lost ... idling
-part of the time, slaving the rest.” (l.c., p. xi.)
-204 “Child. Empl. Comm., IV., Rep.,” p. xxxii., “The extension of the railway system is said to have
-contributed greatly to this custom of giving sudden orders, and the consequent hurry, neglect of meal-
-times, and late hours of the workpeople.” (l.c., p. xxxi.)
-205 “Ch. Empl. Comm, IV. Rep.,” pp. xxxv., n. 235, 237.
-206 “Ch. Empl. Comm. IV. Rep.,” p. 127, n. 56.
-207 “With respect to the loss of trade by non-completion of shipping orders in time, I remember that
-this was the pet argument of the factory masters in 1832 and 1833. Nothing that can be advanced now
-on this subject, could have the force that it had then, before steam had halved all distances and
-established new regulations for transit. It quite failed at that time of proof when put to the test, and
-again it will certainly fail should it have to be tried.” (“Reports of Insp. of Fact., 31 Oct., 1862,” pp.
-54, 55.)
-208 “Ch. Empl. Comm. IV. Rep.,” p. xviii, n. 118.
-209 John Bellers remarked as far back as 1699: “The uncertainty of fashions does increase necessitous
-poor. It has two great mischiefs in it. 1st, The journeymen are miserable in winter for want of work,
-the mercers and master-weavers not daring to lay out their stocks to keep the journeymen employed
-before the spring comes, and they know what the fashion will then be; 2ndly, In the spring the
-351 Chapter 15
-journeymen are not sufficient, but the master-weavers must draw in many prentices, that they may
-supply the trade of the kingdom in a quarter or half a year, which robs the plough of hands, drains the
-country of labourers, and in a great part stocks the city with beggars, and starves some in winter that
-are ashamed to beg.” (“Essays about the Poor, Manufactures, &c.,” p. 9.)
-210 “Ch. Empl. Comm. V. Rep.,” p. 171, n. 34.
-211 The evidence of some Bradford export-houses is as follows: “Under these circumstances, it seems
-clear that no boys need be worked longer than from 8 a.m. to 7 or 7.30 p.m., in making up. It is merely
-a question of extra hands and extra outlay. If some masters were not so greedy, the boys would not
-work late; an extra machine costs only £16 or £18; much of such over-time as does occur is to be
-referred to an insufficiency of appliances, and a want of space.” “Ch. Empl, Comm. V. Rep.,” p. 171,
-n. 35, 36, 38.
-212 l.c. A London manufacturer, who in other respects looks upon the compulsory regulation of the
-hours of labour as a protection for the workpeople against the manufacturers, and for the
-manufacturers themselves against the wholesale trade, states: “The pressure in our business is caused
-by the shippers, who want, e.g., to send the goods by sailing vessel so as to reach their destination at a
-given season, and at the same time want to pocket the difference in freight between a sailing vessel
-and a steamship, or who select the earlier of two steamships in order to be in the foreign market before
-their competitors.”
-213 “This could be obviated,” says a manufacturer, “at the expense of an enlargement of the works
-under the pressure of a General Act of Parliament.” l.c., p. x., n. 38.
-214 l.c., p. xv., n. 72. sqq.
-215 “Rep. Insp. Fact., 31st October, 1865,” p. 127.
-216 It has been found out by experiment, that with each respiration of average intensity made by a
-healthy average individual, about 25 cubic inches of air are consumed, and that about 20 respirations
-are made in each minute. Hence the air inhaled in 24 hours by each individual is about 720,000 cubic
-inches, or 416 cubic feet. It is clear, however, that air which has been once breathed, can no longer
-serve for the same process until it has been purified in the great workshop of Nature. According to the
-experiments of Valentin and Brunner, it appears that a healthy man gives off about 1,300 cubic inches
-of carbonic acid per hour; this would give about 8 ounces of solid carbon thrown off from the lungs in
-24 hours. “Every man should have at least 800 cubic feet.” (Huxley.)
-217 According to the English Factory Act, parents cannot send their children under 14 years of age into
-Factories under the control of the Act, unless at the same time they allow them to receive elementary
-education. The manufacturer is responsible for compliance with the Act. “Factory education is
-compulsory, and it is a condition of labour.” (“Rep. Insp. Fact., 31st Oct., 1865,” p. 111.)
-218 On the very advantageous results of combining gymnastics (and drilling in the case of boys) with
-compulsory education for factory children and pauper scholars, see the speech of N. W. Senior at the
-seventh annual congress of “The National Association for the Promotion of Social Science,” in
-“Report of Proceedings, &c.,” Lond. 1863, pp. 63, 64, also the “Rep. Insp. Fact., 31st Oct., 1865,” pp.
-118, 119, 120, 126, sqq.
-219 “Rep. Insp. Fact., 31st Oct., 1865,” p. 118. A silk manufacturer naïvely states to the Children’s
-Employment Commissioners: “I am quite sure that the true secret of producing efficient workpeople is
-to be found in uniting education and labour from a period of childhood. Of course the occupation must
-not be too severe, nor irksome, or unhealthy. But of the advantage of the union I have no doubt. I wish
-my own children could have some work as well as play to give variety to their schooling.” (“Ch.
-Empl. Comm. V. Rep.,” p. 82, n. 36.)
-352 Chapter 15
-220 Senior, l.c., p. 66. How modern industry, when it has attained to a certain pitch, is capable, by the
-revolution it effects in the mode of production and in the social conditions of production, of also
-revolutionising people’s minds, is strikingly shown by a comparison of Senior’s speech in 1863, with
-his philippic against the Factory Act of 1833; or by a comparison, of the views of the congress above
-referred to, with the fact that in certain country districts of England poor parents are forbidden, on pain
-of death by starvation, to educate their children. Thus, e.g., Mr. Snell reports it to be a common
-occurrence in Somersetshire that, when a poor person claims parish relief, he is compelled to take his
-children from school. Mr. Wollarton, the clergyman at Feltham, also tells of cases where all relief was
-denied to certain families “because they were sending their children to school!”
-221 Wherever handicraft-machines, driven by men, compete directly or indirectly with more developed
-machines driven by mechanical power, a great change takes place with regard to the labourer who
-drives the machine. At first the steam-engine replaces this labourer, afterwards he must replace the
-steam-engine. Consequently the tension and the amount of tambour-power expended become
-monstrous, and especially so in the case of the children who are condemned to this torture. Thus Mr.
-Longe; one of the commissioners, found in Coventry and the neighbourhood boys of from 10 to 15
-years employed in driving the ribbon-looms, not to mention younger children who had to drive
-smaller machines. “It is extraordinarily fatiguing work. The boy is a mere substitute for steam power.”
-(“Ch. Empl. Comm. V, Rep. 1866;” p. 114, n. 6.) As to the fatal consequences of “this system of
-slavery,” as the official report styles it, see l.c., p. 114 sqq.
-222 l.c., p. 3, n. 24.
-223 l.c., P. 7, n. 60.
-224 “In some parts of the Highlands of Scotland, not many years ago, every peasant, according to the
-Statistical Account, made his own shoes of leather tanned by himself. Many a shepherd and cottar too,
-with his wife and children, appeared at Church in clothes which had been touched by no hands but
-their own, since they were shorn from the sheep and sown in the flaxfield. In the preparation of these.
-it is added, scarcely a single article had been purchased, except the awl, needle, thimble, and a very
-few parts of the iron-work employed in the weaving. The dyes, toci, were chiefly extracted by the
-women from trees, shrubs and herbs.” (Dugald Stewart’s “Works,” Hamilton’s Ed., Vol. viii., pp. 327-
-328.)
-225 In the celebrated “Livre des métiers” of Etienne Boileau, we find it prescribed that a journeyman
-on being admitted among the masters had to swear “to love his brethren with brotherly love, to
-support them in their respective trades, not wilfully to betray the secrets of the trade, and besides, in
-the interests of all, not to recommend his own wares by calling the attention of the buyer to defects in
-the articles made by others.”
-226 “The bourgeoisie cannot exist without continually revolutionising the instruments of production,
-and thereby the relations of production and all the social relations. Conservation, in an unaltered form,
-of the old modes of production was on the contrary the first condition of existence for all earlier
-industrial classes. Constant revolution in production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social
-conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation, distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones.
-All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are
-swept away, all new formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into
-air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real
-conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.” (F. Engels und Karl Marx: “Manifest der
-Kommunistischen Partei.” Lond. 1848, p. 5.)
-227 “You take my life
-When you do take the means whereby I live.”
-Shakespeare.
-353 Chapter 15
-228 A French workman, on his return from San-Francisco, writes as follows: “I never could have
-believed, that I was capable of working at the various occupations I was employed on in California. I
-was firmly convinced that I was fit for nothing but letter-press printing.... Once in the midst of this
-world of adventurers, who change their occupation as often as they do their shirt, egad, I did as the
-others. As mining did not turn out remunerative enough, I left it for the town, where in succession I
-became typographer, slater, plumber, &c. In consequence of thus finding out that I am fit to any sort
-of work, I feel less of a mollusk and more of a man.” (A. Corbon, “De l’enseignement professionnel,”
-2ème ed., p. 50.)
-229 John Bellers, a very phenomenon in the history of Political Economy, saw most clearly at the end
-of the 17th century, the necessity for abolishing the present system of education and division of
-labour, which beget hypertrophy and atrophy at the two opposite extremities of society. Amongst
-other things he says this: “An idle learning being little better than the learning of idleness.... Bodily
-labour, it’s a primitive institution of God.... Labour being as proper for the bodies’ health as eating is
-for its living; for what pains a man saves by ease, he will find in disease.... Labour adds oil to the lamp
-of life, when thinking inflames it.... A childish silly employ” (a warning this, by presentiment, against
-the Basedows and their modern imitators) “leaves the children’s minds silly,” (“Proposals for Raising
-a Colledge of Industry of all Useful Trades and Husbandry.” Lond., 1696, pp. 12, 14, 18.)
-230 This sort of labour goes on mostly in small workshops, as we have seen in the lacemaking and
-straw-plaiting trades, and as could be shown more in detail from the metal trades of Sheffield,
-Birmingham, &c.
-231 “Ch. Empl. Comm., V. Rep.,” p. xxv., n. 162, and II. Rep., p. xxxviii., n, 285, 289, p. xxv., xxvi., n.
-191.
-232 “Factory labour may be as pure and as excellent as domestic labour, and perhaps more so.” (“Rep.
-Insp. of Fact., 31st October, 1865,” p. 129.)
-233 “Rep. Insp. of Fact., 31st October, 1865,” pp. 27-32.
-234 Numerous instances will be found in “Rep. of Insp. of Fact.”
-235 “Ch. Empl. Comm., V. Rep.,” p. x., n. 35.
-236 “Ch. Empl. Comm., V. Rep.,” p. ix., n. 28.
-237 l.c., p. xxv., n. 165-167. As to the advantages of large scale, compared with small scale, industries,
-see “Ch. Empl. Comm., III. Rep.,” p. 13, n. 144, p. 25, n. 121, p. 26, n. 125, p. 27, n. 140, &c.
-238 The trades proposed to be brought under the Act were the following: Lace-making, stocking-
-weaving, straw-plaiting, the manufacture of wearing apparel with its numerous sub-divisions, artificial
-flower-making, shoemaking, hat-making, glove-making, tailoring, all metal works, from blast
-furnaces down to needleworks, &c., paper-mills, glassworks, tobacco factories, India-rubber works,
-braid-making (for weaving), hand-carpetmaking, umbrella and parasol making, the manufacture of
-spindles and spools, letterpress printing, book-binding, manufacture of stationery (including paper
-bags, cards, coloured paper, &c.), rope-making, manufacture of jet ornaments, brick-making, silk
-manufacture by hand, Coventry weaving, salt works, tallow chandlers, cement works, sugar refineries,
-biscuit-making, various industries connected with timber, and other mixed trades.
-239 l.c., p. xxv., n. 169.
-240 Here (from “The Tory Cabinet...... to “Nassau W. Senior") the English text has been altered in
-conformity with the 4th German edition. — Ed.
-241 The Factory Acts Extension Act was passed on August 12, 1867. It regulates all foundries,
-smithies, and metal manufactories, including machine shops; furthermore glass-works, paper mills,
-gutta-percha and India-rubber works, tobacco manufactories, letter-press printing and book-binding
-works, and, lastly, all workshops in which more than 50 persons are employed. The Hours of Labour
-354 Chapter 15
-Regulation Act, passed on August 17, 1867, regulates the smaller workshops and the so-called
-domestic industries. I shall revert to these Acts and to the new Mining Act of 1872 in Volume II.
-242 Senior, “Social Science Congress,” pp. 55-58.
-243 The “personnel” of this staff consisted of 2 inspectors, 2 assistant inspectors and 41 sub-inspectors.
-Eight additional sub-inspectors were appointed in 1871. The total cost of administering the Acts in
-England, Scotland, and Ireland amounted for the year 1871-72 to no more than £25,347, inclusive of
-the law expenses incurred by prosecutions of offending masters.
-244 Robert Owen, the father of Co-operative Factories and Stores, but who, as before remarked, in no
-way shared the illusions of his followers with regard to the bearing of these isolated elements of
-transformation, not only practically made the factory system the sole foundation of his experiments,
-but also declared that system to be theoretically the starting-point of the social revolution. Herr
-Vissering, Professor of Political Economy in the University of Leyden, appears to have a suspicion of
-this when, in his “Handboek van Practische Staatshuishoudkunde, 1860-62,” which reproduces all the
-platitudes of vulgar economy, he strongly supports handicrafts against the factory system.
-[Added in the 4th German edition — The “hopelessly bewildering tangle of contradictory
-enactments” (S. 314) (present volume, p. 284) which English legislation called into life by means of
-the mutually conflicting Factory Acts, the Factory Acts Extension Act and the Workshops’ Act,
-finally became intolerable, and thus all legislative enactments on this subject were codified in the
-Factory and Workshop Act of 1878. Of course no detailed critique of this English industrial code now
-in effect can be presented here. The following remarks will have to suffice. The Act comprises:
-1) Textile Mills. Here everything remains about as it was: children more than 10 years of age may
-work 5½ hours a day; or 6 hours and Saturday off; young persons and women, 10 hours on 5 days, and
-at most 6½ on Saturday.
-2) Non-Textile Factories. Here the regulations are brought closer than before to those of No. 1, but
-there are still several exceptions which favour the capitalists and which in certain cases may be
-expanded by special permission of the Home Secretary.
-3) Workshops, defined approximately as in the former Act; as for the children, young workers and
-women employed there, the workshops are about on a par with the non-textile factories, but again
-conditions are easier in details.
-4) Workshops in which no children or young workers are employed, but only persons of both sexes
-above the age of 18; this category enjoy still easier conditions.
-5) Domestic Workshops, where only members of the family are employed, in the family dwelling:
-still more elastic regulations and simultaneously the restriction that the inspector may, without special
-permission of the ministry or a court, enter only rooms not used also for dwelling purposes; and lastly
-unrestricted freedom for straw-plaiting and lace and glove-making by members of the family. With all
-its defects this Act, together with the Swiss Federal Factory Law of March 23, 1877, is still by far the
-best piece of legislation in this field. A comparison of it with the said Swiss federal law is of particular
-interest because it clearly demonstrates the merits and demerits of the two legislative methods — the
-English, “historical” method, which intervenes when occasion requires, and the continental method,
-which is built up on the traditions of the French Revolution and generalises more. Unfortunately, due
-to insufficient inspection personnel, the English code is still largely a dead letter with regard to its
-application to workshops. — F. E.]
-245 “You divide the people into two hostile camps of clownish boors and emasculated dwarfs. Good
-heavens! a nation divided into agricultural and commercial interests, calling itself sane; nay, styling
-itself enlightened and civilised, not only in spite of, but in consequence of this monstrous and
-unnatural division.” (David Urquhart, l.c., p. 119.) This passage shows, at one and the same time, the
-355 Chapter 15
-strength and the weakness of that kind of criticism which knows how to judge and condemn the
-present, but not how to comprehend it.
-246 See Liebig: “Die Chemie in ihrer Anwendung auf Agricultur und Physiologie,” 7. Auflage, 1862,
-and especially the “Einleitung in die Naturgesetze des Feldbaus,” in the 1st Volume. To have
-developed from the point of view of natural science, the negative, i.e., destructive side of modern
-agriculture, is one of Liebig’s immortal merits. His summary, too, of the history of agriculture,
-although not free from gross errors, contains flashes of light. It is, however, to be regretted that he
-ventures on such haphazard assertions as the following: “By greater pulverising and more frequent
-ploughing, the circulation of air in the interior of porous soil is aided, and the surface exposed to the
-action of the atmosphere is increased and renewed; but it is easily seen that the increased yield of the
-land cannot be proportional to the labour spent on that land, but increases in a much smaller
-proportion. This law,” adds Liebig, “was first enunciated by John Stuart Mill in his ‘Principles of Pol.
-Econ.,’ Vol. 1, p. 17, as follows: ‘That the produce of land increases, caeteris paribus, in a
-diminishing ratio to the increase of the labourers employed’ (Mill here introduces in an erroneous
-form the law enunciated by Ricardo’s school, for since the ‘decrease of the labourers employed,’ kept
-even pace in England with the advance of agriculture, the law discovered in, and applied to, England,
-could have no application to that country, at all events), ‘is the universal law of agricultural industry.’
-This is very remarkable, since Mill was ignorant of the reason for this law.” (Liebig, l.c., Bd. I., p. 143
-and Note.) Apart from Liebig’s wrong interpretation of the word “labour,” by which word he
-understands something quite different from what Political Economy does, it is, in any case, “very
-remarkable” that he should make Mr. John Stuart Mill the first propounder of a theory which was first
-published by James Anderson in A. Smith’s days, and was repeated in various works down to the
-beginning of the 19th century; a theory which Malthus, that master in plagiarism (the whole of his
-population theory is a shameless plagiarism), appropriated to himself in 1815; which West developed
-at the same time as, and independently of, Anderson; which in the year 1817 was connected by
-Ricardo with the general theory of value, then made the round of the world as Ricardo’s theory, and in
-1820 was vulgarised by James Mill, the father of John Stuart Mill; and which, finally, was reproduced
-by John Stuart Mill and others, as a dogma already quite commonplace, and known to every
-schoolboy. It cannot be denied that John Stuart Mill owes his, at all events, “remarkable” authority
-almost entirely to such quid-pro-quos.
-Part 5: Production of Absolute and
-Relative Surplus-Value
-357 Chapter 16
-Chapter 16: Absolute and Relative Surplus-
-Value
-In considering the labour-process, we began (see Chapter VII.) by treating it in the abstract, apart
-from its historical forms, as a process between man and Nature. We there stated, “If we examine
-the whole labour-process, from the point of view of its result, it is plain that both the instruments
-and the subject of labour are means of production, and that the labour itself is productive labour.”
-And in Note 2, same page, we further added: “This method of determining, from the standpoint of
-the labour-process alone, what is productive labour, is by no means directly applicable to the case
-of the capitalist process of production.” We now proceed to the further development of this
-subject.
-So far as the labour-process is purely individual, one and the same labourer unites in himself all
-the functions, that later on become separated. When an individual appropriates natural objects for
-his livelihood, no one controls him but himself. Afterwards he is controlled by others. A single
-man cannot operate upon Nature without calling his own muscles into play under the control of
-his own brain. As in the natural body head and hand wait upon each other, so the labour-process
-unites the labour of the hand with that of the head. Later on they part company and even become
-deadly foes. The product ceases to be the direct product of the individual, and becomes a social
-product, produced in common by a collective labourer, i.e., by a combination of workmen, each
-of whom takes only a part, greater or less, in the manipulation of the subject of their labour. As
-the co-operative character of the labour-process becomes more and more marked, so, as a
-necessary consequence, does our notion of productive labour, and of its agent the productive
-labourer, become extended. In order to labour productively, it is no longer necessary for you to do
-manual work yourself; enough, if you are an organ of the collective labourer, and perform one of
-its subordinate functions. The first definition given above of productive labour, a definition
-deduced from the very nature of the production of material objects, still remains correct for the
-collective labourer, considered as a whole. But it no longer holds good for each member taken
-individually.
-On the other hand, however, our notion of productive labour becomes narrowed. Capitalist
-production is not merely the production of commodities, it is essentially the production of
-surplus-value. The labourer produces, not for himself, but for capital. It no longer suffices,
-therefore, that he should simply produce. He must produce surplus-value. That labourer alone is
-productive, who produces surplus-value for the capitalist, and thus works for the self-expansion
-of capital. If we may take an example from outside the sphere of production of material objects, a
-schoolmaster is a productive labourer when, in addition to belabouring the heads of his scholars,
-he works like a horse to enrich the school proprietor. That the latter has laid out his capital in a
-teaching factory, instead of in a sausage factory, does not alter the relation. Hence the notion of a
-productive labourer implies not merely a relation between work and useful effect, between
-labourer and product of labour, but also a specific, social relation of production, a relation that
-has sprung up historically and stamps the labourer as the direct means of creating surplus-value.
-To be a productive labourer is, therefore, not a piece of luck, but a misfortune. In Book IV. which
-treats of the history of the theory, it will be more clearly seen, that the production of surplus-value
-has at all times been made, by classical political economists, the distinguishing characteristic of
-the productive labourer. Hence their definition of a productive labourer changes with their
-comprehension of the nature of surplus-value. Thus the Physiocrats insist that only agricultural
-358 Chapter 16
-labour is productive, since that alone, they say, yields a surplus-value. And they say so because,
-with them, surplus-value has no existence except in the form of rent.
-The prolongation of the working day beyond the point at which the labourer would have
-produced just an equivalent for the value of his labour-power, and the appropriation of that
-surplus labour by capital, this is production of absolute surplus-value. It forms the general
-groundwork of the capitalist system, and the starting-point for the production of relative surplus-
-value. The latter pre-supposes that the working day is already divided into two parts, necessary
-labour, and surplus labour. In order to prolong the surplus labour, the necessary labour is
-shortened by methods whereby the equivalent for the wages is produced in less time. The
-production of absolute surplus-value turns exclusively upon the length of the working day; the
-production of relative surplus-value, revolutionises out and out the technical processes of labour,
-and the composition of society. It therefore pre-supposes a specific mode, the capitalist mode of
-production, a mode which, along with its methods, means, and conditions, arises and develops
-itself spontaneously on the foundation afforded by the formal subjection of labour to capital. In
-the course of this development, the formal subjection is replaced by the real subjection of labour
-to capital.
-It will suffice merely to refer to certain intermediate forms, in which surplus labour is not
-extorted by direct compulsion from the producer, nor the producer himself yet formally subjected
-to capital. In such forms capital has not yet acquired the direct control of the labour-process. By
-the side of independent producers who carry on their handicrafts and agriculture in the traditional
-old-fashioned way, there stands the usurer or the merchant, with his usurer’s capital or merchant’s
-capital, feeding on them like a parasite. The predominance, in a society, of this form of
-exploitation excludes the capitalist mode of production; to which mode, however, this form may
-serve as a transition, as it did towards the close of the Middle Ages. Finally, as is shown by
-modern “domestic industry,” some intermediate forms are here and there reproduced in the
-background of Modern Industry, though their physiognomy is totally changed.
-If, on the one hand, the mere formal subjection of labour to capital suffices for the production of
-absolute surplus-value, if, e.g., it is sufficient that handicraftsmen who previously worked on their
-own account, or as apprentices of a master, should become wage labourers under the direct
-control of a capitalist; so, on the other hand, we have seen, how the methods of producing relative
-surplus-value, are, at the same time, methods of producing absolute surplus-value. Nay, more, the
-excessive prolongation of the working day turned out to be the peculiar product of Modern
-Industry. Generally speaking, the specifically capitalist mode of production ceases to be a mere
-means of producing relative surplus-value, so soon as that mode has conquered an entire branch
-of production; and still more so, so soon as it has conquered all the important branches. It then
-becomes the general, socially predominant form of production. As a special method of producing
-relative surplus-value, it remains effective only, first, in so far as it seizes upon industries that
-previously were only formally subject to capital, that is, so far as it is propagandist; secondly, in
-so far as the industries that have been taken over by it, continue to be revolutionised by changes
-in the methods of production.
-From one standpoint, any distinction between absolute and relative surplus-value appears
-illusory. Relative surplus-value is absolute, since it compels the absolute prolongation of the
-working day beyond the labour-time necessary to the existence of the labourer himself. Absolute
-surplus-value is relative, since it makes necessary such a development of the productiveness of
-labour, as will allow of the necessary labour-time being confined to a portion of the working day.
-But if we keep in mind the behaviour of surplus-value, this appearance of identity vanishes. Once
-the capitalist mode of production is established and become general, the difference between
-359 Chapter 16
-absolute and relative surplus-value makes itself felt, whenever there is a question of raising the
-rate of surplus-value. Assuming that labour-power is paid for at its value, we are confronted by
-this alternative: given the productiveness of labour and its normal intensity, the rate of surplus-
-value can be raised only by the actual prolongation of the working day; on the other hand, given
-the length of the working day, that rise can be effected only by a change in the relative
-magnitudes of the components of the working day, viz., necessary labour and surplus labour; a
-change which, if the wages are not to fall below the value of labour-power, presupposes a change
-either in the productiveness or in the intensity of the labour.
-If the labourer wants all his time to produce the necessary means of subsistence for himself and
-his race, he has no time left in which to work gratis for others. Without a certain degree of
-productiveness in his labour, he has no such superfluous time at his disposal; without such
-superfluous time, no surplus labour, and therefore no capitalists, no slave-owners, no feudal lords,
-in one word, no class of large proprietors.1
-Thus we may say that surplus-value rests on a natural basis; but this is permissible only in the
-very general sense, that there is no natural obstacle absolutely preventing one man from
-disburdening himself of the labour requisite for his own existence, and burdening another with it,
-any more, for instance, than unconquerable natural obstacle prevent one man from eating the
-flesh of another.2 No mystical ideas must in any way be connected, as sometimes happens, with
-this historically developed productiveness of labour. It is only after men have raised themselves
-above the rank of animals, when therefore their labour has been to some extent socialised, that a
-state of things arises in which the surplus labour of the one becomes a condition of existence for
-the other. At the dawn of civilisation the productiveness acquired by labour is small, but so too
-are the wants which develop with and by the means of satisfying them. Further, at that early
-period, the portion of society that lives on the labour of others is infinitely small compared with
-the mass of direct producers. Along with the progress in the productiveness of labour, that small
-portion of society increases both absolutely and relatively.3 Besides, capital with its
-accompanying relations springs up from an economic soil that is the product of a long process of
-development. The productiveness of labour that serves as its foundation and starting-point, is a
-gift, not of nature, but of a history embracing thousands of centuries.
-Apart from the degree of development, greater or less, in the form of social production, the
-productiveness of labour is fettered by physical conditions. These are all referable to the
-constitution of man himself (race, &c.), and to surrounding nature. The external physical
-conditions fall into two great economic classes, (1) Natural wealth in means of subsistence, i.e., a
-fruitful soil, waters teeming with fish, &c., and (2), natural wealth in the instruments of labour,
-such as waterfalls, navigable rivers, wood, metal, coal, &c. At the dawn of civilisation, it is the
-first class that turns the scale; at a higher stage of development, it is the second. Compare, for
-example, England with India, or in ancient times, Athens and Corinth with the shores of the Black
-Sea.
-The fewer the number of natural wants imperatively calling for satisfaction, and the greater the
-natural fertility of the soil and the favourableness of the climate, so much less is the labour-time
-necessary for the maintenance and reproduction of the producer. So much greater therefore can be
-the excess of his labours for others over his labour for himself. Diodorus long ago remarked this
-in relation to the ancient Egyptians.
-“It is altogether incredible how little trouble and expense the bringing up of their
-children causes them. They cook for them the first simple food at hand; they also
-give them the lower part of the papyrus stem to eat, so far as it can be roasted in
-the fire, and the roots and stalks of marsh plants, some raw, some boiled and
-360 Chapter 16
-roasted. Most of the children go without shoes and unclothed, for the air is so
-mild. Hence a child, until he is grown up, costs his parents not more, on the
-whole, than twenty drachmas. It is this, chiefly, which explains why the
-population of Egypt is so numerous, and, therefore, why so many great works can
-be undertaken.”4
-Nevertheless the grand structures of ancient Egypt are less due to the extent of its population than
-to the large proportion of it that was freely disposable. Just as the individual labourer can do more
-surplus labour in proportion as his necessary labour-time is less, so with regard to the working
-population. The smaller the part of it which is required for the production of the necessary means
-of subsistence, so much the greater is the part that can be set to do other work.
-Capitalist production once assumed, then, all other circumstances remaining the same, and given
-the length of the working day, the quantity of surplus labour will vary with the physical
-conditions of labour, especially with the fertility of the soil. But it by no means follows from this
-that the most fruitful soil is the most fitted for the growth of the capitalist mode of production.
-This mode is based on the dominion of man over nature. Where nature is too lavish, she “keeps
-him in hand, like a child in leading-strings.” She does not impose upon him any necessity to
-develop himself.5 It is not the tropics with their luxuriant vegetation, but the temperate zone, that
-is the mother-country of capital. It is not the mere fertility of the soil, but the differentiation of the
-soil, the variety of its natural products, the changes of the seasons, which form the physical basis
-for the social division of labour, and which, by changes in the natural surroundings, spur man on
-to the multiplication of his wants, his capabilities, his means and modes of labour. It is the
-necessity of bringing a natural force under the control of society, of economising, of
-appropriating or subduing it on a large scale by the work of man’s hand, that first plays the
-decisive part in the history of industry. Examples are, the irrigation works in Egypt,6 Lombardy,
-Holland, or in India and Persia where irrigation by means of artificial canals, not only supplies the
-soil with the water indispensable to it, but also carries down to it, in the shape of sediment from
-the hills, mineral fertilisers. The secret of the flourishing state of industry in Spain and Sicily
-under the dominion of the Arabs lay in their irrigation works.7
-Favourable natural conditions alone, give us only the possibility, never the reality, of surplus
-labour, nor, consequently, of surplus-value and a surplus-product. The result of difference in the
-natural conditions of labour is this, that the same quantity of labour satisfies, in different
-countries, a different mass of requirements,8 consequently, that under circumstances in other
-respects analogous, the necessary labour-time is different. These conditions affect surplus labour
-only as natural limits, i.e., by fixing the points at which labour for others can begin. In proportion
-as industry advances, these natural limits recede. In the midst of our West European society,
-where the labourer purchases the right to work for his own livelihood only by paying for it in
-surplus labour, the idea easily takes root that it is an inherent quality of human labour to furnish a
-surplus-product.9 But consider, for example, an inhabitant of the eastern islands of the Asiatic
-Archipelago, where sago grows wild in the forests.
-“When the inhabitants have convinced themselves, by boring a hole in the tree,
-that the pith is ripe, the trunk is cut down and divided into several pieces, the pith
-is extracted, mixed with water and filtered: it is then quite fit for use as sago. One
-tree commonly yields 300 lbs., and occasionally 500 to 600 lbs. There, then,
-people go into the forests, and cut bread for themselves, just as with us they cut
-fire-wood.” 10
-Suppose now such an eastern bread-cutter requires 12 working hours a week for the satisfaction
-of all his wants. Nature’s direct gift to him is plenty of leisure time. Before he can apply this
-361 Chapter 16
-leisure time productively for himself, a whole series of historical events is required; before he
-spends it in surplus labour for strangers, compulsion is necessary. If capitalist production were
-introduced, the honest fellow would perhaps have to work six days a week, in order to appropriate
-to himself the product of one working day. The bounty of Nature does not explain why he would
-then have to work 6 days a week, or why he must furnish 5 days of surplus labour. It explains
-only why his necessary labour-time would be limited to one day a week. But in no case would his
-surplus-product arise from some occult quality inherent in human labour.
-Thus, not only does the historically developed social productiveness of labour, but also its natural
-productiveness, appear to be productiveness of the capital with which that labour is incorporated.
-Ricardo never concerns himself about the origin of surplus-value. He treats it as a thing inherent
-in the capitalist mode of production, which mode, in his eyes, is the natural form of social
-production. Whenever he discusses the productiveness of labour, he seeks in it, not the cause of
-surplus-value, but the cause that determines the magnitude of that value. On the other hand, his
-school has openly proclaimed the productiveness of labour to be the originating cause of profit
-(read: Surplus-value). This at all events is a progress as against the mercantilists who, on their
-side, derived the excess of the price over the cost of production of the product, from the act of
-exchange, from the product being sold above its value. Nevertheless, Ricardo’s school simply
-shirked the problem, they did not solve it. In fact these bourgeois economists instinctively saw,
-and rightly so, that it is very dangerous to stir too deeply the burning question of the origin of
-surplus-value. But what are we to think of John Stuart Mill, who, half a century after Ricardo,
-solemnly claims superiority over the mercantilists, by clumsily repeating the wretched evasions
-of Ricardo’s earliest vulgarisers?
-Mill says:
-“The cause of profit is that labour produces more than is required for its support.”
-So far, nothing but the old story; but Mill wishing to add something of his own, proceeds:
-“To vary the form of the theorem; the reason why capital yields a profit, is
-because food, clothing, materials and tools, last longer than the time which was
-required to produce them.”
-He here confounds the duration of labour-time with the duration of its products. According to this
-view, a baker whose product lasts only a day, could never extract from his workpeople the same
-profit, as a machine maker whose products endure for 20 years and more. Of course it is very
-true, that if a bird’s nest did not last longer than the time it takes in building, birds would have to
-do without nests.
-This fundamental truth once established, Mill establishes his own superiority over the
-mercantilists.
-“We thus see,” he proceeds, “that profit arises, not from the incident of exchange,
-but from the productive power of labour; and the general profit of the country is
-always what the productive power of labour makes it, whether any exchange takes
-place or not. If there were no division of employments, there would be no buying
-or selling, but there would still be profit.”
-For Mill then, exchange, buying and selling, those general conditions of capitalist production, are
-but an incident, and there would always be profits even without the purchase and sale of labour-
-power!
-“If,” he continues, “the labourers of the country collectively produce twenty per cent more than
-their wages, profits will be twenty per cent, whatever prices may or may not be.” This is, on the
-362 Chapter 16
-one hand, a rare bit of tautology; for if labourers produce a surplus-value of 20% for the
-capitalist, his profit will be to the total wages of the labourers as 20:100. On the other hand, it is
-absolutely false to say that “profits will be 20%.” They will always be less, because they are
-calculated upon the sum total of the capital advanced. If, for example, the capitalist have
-advanced £500, of which £4OO is laid out in means of production and £100 in wages, and if the
-rate of surplus-value be 20%, the rate of profit will be 20:500, i.e., 4% and not 20%.
-Then follows a splendid example of Mill’s method of handling the different historical forms of
-social production.
-“I assume, throughout, the state of things which, where the labourers and
-capitalists are separate classes, prevails, with few exceptions, universally; namely,
-that the capitalist advances the whole expenses, including the entire remuneration
-of the labourer.”
-Strange optical illusion to see everywhere a state of things which as yet exists only exceptionally
-on our earth.11 But let us finish – Mill is willing to concede,
-“that he should do so is not a matter of inherent necessity.” On the contrary: “the
-labourer might wait, until the production is complete, for all that part of his wages
-which exceeds mere necessaries: and even for the whole, if he has funds in hand
-sufficient for his temporary support. But in the latter case, the labourer is to that
-extent really a capitalist in the concern, by supplying a portion of the funds
-necessary for carrying it on.”
-Mill might have gone further and have added, that the labourer who advances to himself not only
-the necessaries of life but also the means of production, is in reality nothing but his own wage-
-labourer. He might also have said that the American peasant proprietor is but a serf who does
-enforced labour for himself instead of for his lord.
-After thus proving clearly, that even if capitalist production had no existence, still it would
-always exist, Mill is consistent enough to show, on the contrary, that it has no existence, even
-when it does exist.
-“And even in the former case” (when the workman is a wage labourer to whom
-the capitalist advances all the necessaries of life, he the labourer), “may be looked
-upon in the same light,” (i.e., as a capitalist), “since, contributing his labour at less
-than the market-price, (!) he may be regarded as lending the difference (?) to his
-employer and receiving it back with interest, &c.” 12
-In reality, the labourer advances his labour gratuitously to the capitalist during, say one week, in
-order to receive the market price at the end of the week, &c., and it is this which, according to
-Mill, transforms him into a capitalist. On the level plain, simple mounds look like hills; and the
-imbecile flatness of the present bourgeoisie is to be measured by the altitude of its great intellects.
-1 “The very existence of the master-capitalists, as a distinct class, is dependent on the productiveness
-of industry.” (Ramsay, l.c., p. 206.) “If each man’s labour were but enough to produce his own food,
-there could be no property.” (Ravenstone, l.c. p. 14, 15.)
-2 According to a recent calculation, there are yet at least 4,000,000 cannibals in those parts of the earth
-which have already been explored.
-363 Chapter 16
-3 “Among the wild Indians in America, almost everything is the labourer’s, 99 parts of a hundred are
-to be put upon the account of labour. In England, perhaps, the labourer has not 2/3.” (The Advantages
-of the East India Trade, &c., p. 73.)
-4 Diodorus, l.c., l. I., c. 80.
-5 “The first (natural wealth) as it is most noble and advantageous, so doth it make the people careless,
-proud, and given to all excesses; whereas the second enforceth vigilancy, literature, arts and policy.”
-(England’s Treasure by Foreign Trade. Or the Balance of our Foreign Trade is the Rule of our
-Treasure. Written by Thomas Mun of London, merchant, and now published for the common good by
-his son John Mun. London, 1669, p. 181, 182.) “Nor can I conceive a greater curse upon a body of
-people, than to be thrown upon a spot of land, where the productions for subsistence and food were, in
-great measure, spontaneous, and the climate required or admitted little care for raiment and covering...
-there may be an extreme on the other side. A soil incapable of produce by labour is quite as bad as a
-soil that produces plentifully without any labour.” (An Inquiry into the Present High Price of
-Provisions. Lond. 1767, p. 10.)
-6 The necessity for predicting the rise and fall of the Nile created Egyptian astronomy, and with it the
-dominion of the priests, as directors of agriculture. “Le solstice est le moment de l’année ou
-commence la crue du Nil, et celui que les Egyptiens ont du observer avec le plus d’attention.... C’était
-cette année tropique qu’il leur importait de marquer pour se diriger dans leurs opérations agricoles. Ils
-durent donc chercher dans le ciel un signe apparent de son retour.” [The solstice is the moment of the
-year when the Nile begins to rise, and it is the moment the Egyptians have had to watch for with the
-greatest attention ... It was the evolution of the tropical year which they had to establish firmly so as to
-conduct their agricultural operations in accordance with it. They therefore had to search the heavens
-for a visible sign of the solstice’s return.] (Cuvier: Discours sur les révolutions du globe, ed. Hoefer,
-Paris, 1863, p. 141.)
-7 One of the material bases of the power of the state over the small disconnected producing organisms
-in India, was the regulation of the water supply. The Mahometan rulers of India understood this better
-than their English successors. It is enough to recall to mind the famine of 1866, which cost the lives of
-more than a million Hindus in the district of Orissa, in the Bengal presidency.
-8 “There are no two countries which furnish an equal number of the necessaries of life in equal plenty,
-and with the same quantity of labour. Men’s wants increase or diminish with the severity or
-temperateness of the climate they live in; consequently, the proportion of trade which the inhabitants
-of different countries are obliged to carry on through necessity cannot be the same, nor is it practicable
-to ascertain the degree of variation farther than by the degrees of Heat and Cold; from whence one
-may make this general conclusion, that the quantity of labour required for a certain number of people
-is greatest in cold climates, and least in hot ones; for in the former men not only want more clothes,
-but the earth more cultivating than in the latter.” (An Essay on the Governing Causes of the Natural
-Rate of Interest. Lond. 1750. p. 60.) The author of this epoch-making anonymous work is J. Massy.
-Hume took his theory of interest from it.
-9 “Chaque travail doit (this appears also to be part of the droits et devoirs du citoyen [rights and duties
-of the citizen]) laisser un excédent.” [All labour must leave a surplus] Proudhon.
-10 F. Schouw: “Die Erde, die Pflanze und der Mensch,” 2. Ed. Leipz. 1854, p. 148.
-11 In earlier editions of Capital the quotation from John Stuart Mill, “I assume throughout...of the
-labourer,” had been given incorrectly, the words “where the labourers and capitalists are separate
-classes” having been left out. Marx, in a letter dated November 28, 1878, pointed this out to
-Danielson, the Russian translator of Capital, adding:
-364 Chapter 16
-“The next two sentences, viz. ‘Strange optical illusion to see everywhere a state of things which as yet
-exists only exceptionally on our earth. But let us finish’ ‒ should be deleted and the following
-sentence substituted:
-“Mr. Mill is good enough to believe that this state of things is not an absolute necessity, even in that
-economic system in which ‘labourers and capitalists are separate classes.’”
-The substance of this note has been taken from the Volksausgabe. The quotation from Mill is from his
-Principles of Political Economy, Book II, Chap XV, 5.
-12 J. St. Mill. Principles of Pol. Econ. Lond. 1868, p. 252-53 passim.
-Chapter 17: Changes of Magnitude in the Price
-of Labour-Power and in Surplus-Value
-The value of labour-power is determined by the value of the necessaries of life habitually
-required by the average labourer. The quantity of these necessaries is known at any given epoch
-of a given society, and can therefore be treated as a constant magnitude. What changes, is the
-value of this quantity. There are, besides, two other factors that enter into the determination of the
-value of labour-power. One, the expenses of developing that power, which expenses vary with the
-mode of production; the other, its natural diversity, the difference between the labour-power of
-men and women, of children and adults. The employment of these different sorts of labour-
-power, an employment which is, in its turn, made necessary by the mode of production, makes a
-great difference in the cost of maintaining the family of the labourer, and in the value of the
-labour-power of the adult male. Both these factors, however, are excluded in the following
-investigation.1
-I assume (1) that commodities are sold at their value; (2) that the price of labour-power rises
-occasionally above its value, but never sinks below it.
-On this assumption we have seen that the relative magnitudes of surplus-value and of price of
-labour-power are determined by three circumstances; (1) the length of the working day, or the
-extensive magnitude of labour; (2) the normal intensity of labour, its intensive magnitude,
-whereby a given quantity of labour is expended in a given time; (3) the productiveness of labour,
-whereby the same quantum of labour yields, in a given time, a greater or less quantum of product,
-dependent on the degree of development in the conditions of production. Very different
-combinations are clearly possible, according as one of the three factors is constant and two
-variable, or two constant and one variable, or lastly, all three simultaneously variable. And the
-number of these combinations is augmented by the fact that, when these factors simultaneously
-vary, the amount and direction of their respective variations may differ. In what follows the chief
-combinations alone are considered.
-Section 1: Length of the Working day and Intensity of Labour
-Constant. Productiveness of Labour Variable
-On these assumptions the value of labour-power, and the magnitude of surplus-value, are
-determined by three laws.
-(1.) A working day of given length always creates the same amount of value, no matter how the
-productiveness of labour, and, with it, the mass of the product, and the price of each single
-commodity produced, may vary.
-If the value created by a working day of 12 hours be, say, six shillings, then, although the mass of
-the articles produced varies with the productiveness of labour, the only result is that the value
-represented by six shillings is spread over a greater or less number of articles.
-(2.) Surplus-value and the value of labour-power vary in opposite directions. A variation in the
-productiveness of labour, its increase or diminution, causes a variation in the opposite direction in
-the value of labour-power, and in the same direction in surplus-value.
-The value created by a working day of 12 hours is a constant quantity, say, six shillings. This
-constant quantity is the sum of the surplus-value plus the value of the labour-power, which latter
-366 Chapter 17
-value the labourer replaces by an equivalent. It is self-evident, that if a constant quantity consists
-of two parts, neither of them can increase without the other diminishing. Let the two parts at
-starting be equal; 3 shillings value of labour-power, 3 shillings surplus-value. Then the value of
-the labour-power cannot rise from three shillings to four, without the surplus-value falling from
-three shillings to two; and the surplus-value cannot rise from three shillings to four, without the
-value of labour-power falling from three shillings to two. Under these circumstances, therefore,
-no change can take place in the absolute magnitude, either of the surplus-value, or of the value of
-labour-power, without a simultaneous change in their relative magnitudes, i.e., relatively to each
-other. It is impossible for them to rise or fall simultaneously.
-Further, the value of labour-power cannot fall, and consequently surplus-value cannot rise,
-without a rise in the productiveness of labour. For instance, in the above case, the value of the
-labour-power cannot sink from three shillings to two, unless an increase in the productiveness of
-labour makes it possible to produce in 4 hours the same quantity of necessaries as previously
-required 6 hours to produce. On the other hand, the value of the labour-power cannot rise from
-three shillings to four, without a decrease in the productiveness of labour, whereby eight hours
-become requisite to produce the same quantity of necessaries, for the production of which six
-hours previously sufficed. It follows from this, that an increase in the productiveness of labour
-causes a fall in the value of labour-power and a consequent rise in surplus-value, while, on the
-other hand, a decrease in such productiveness causes a rise in the value of labour-power, and a
-fall in surplus-value.
-In formulating this law, Ricardo overlooked one circumstance; although a change in the
-magnitude of the surplus-value or surplus labour causes a change in the opposite direction in the
-magnitude of the value of labour-power, or in the quantity of necessary labour, it by no means
-follows that they vary in the same proportion. They do increase or diminish by the same quantity.
-But their proportional increase or diminution depends on their original magnitudes before the
-change in the productiveness of labour took place. If the value of the labour-power be 4 shillings,
-or the necessary labour time 8 hours, and the surplus-value be 2 shillings, or the surplus labour 4
-hours, and if, in consequence of an increase in the productiveness of labour, the value of the
-labour-power fall to 3 shillings, or the necessary labour to 6 hours, the surplus-value will rise to 3
-shillings, or the surplus labour to 6 hours. The same quantity, 1 shilling or 2 hours, is added in
-one case and subtracted in the other. But the proportional change of magnitude is different in each
-case. While the value of the labour-power falls from 4 shillings to 3, i.e., by 1/4 or 25%, the
-surplus-value rises from 2 shillings to 3, i.e., by 1/2 or 50%. It therefore follows that the
-proportional increase or diminution in surplus-value, consequent on a given change in the
-productiveness of labour, depends on the original magnitude of that portion of the working day
-which embodies itself in surplus-value; the smaller that portion, the greater is the proportional
-change; the greater that portion, the less is the proportional change.
-(3.) Increase or diminution in surplus-value is always consequent on, and never the cause of, the
-corresponding diminution or increase in the value of labour-power.2
-Since the working day is constant in magnitude, and is represented by a value of constant
-magnitude, since, to every variation in the magnitude of surplus-value, there corresponds an
-inverse variation in the value of labour-power, and since the value of labour-power cannot
-change, except in consequence of a change in the productiveness of labour, it clearly follows,
-under these conditions, that every change of magnitude in surplus-value arises from an inverse
-change of magnitude in the value of labour-power. If, then, as we have already seen, there can be
-no change of absolute magnitude in the value of labour-power, and in surplus-value,
-unaccompanied by a change in their relative magnitudes, so now it follows that no change in their
-367 Chapter 17
-relative magnitudes is possible, without a previous change in the absolute magnitude of the value
-of labour-power.
-According to the third law, a change in the magnitude of surplus-value, presupposes a movement
-in the value of labour-power, which movement is brought about by a variation in the
-productiveness of labour. The limit of this change is given by the altered value of labour-power.
-Nevertheless, even when circumstances allow the law to operate, subsidiary movements may
-occur. For example: if in consequence of the increased productiveness of labour, the value of
-labour-power falls from 4 shillings to 3, or the necessary labour time from 8 hours to 6, the price
-of labour-power may possibly not fall below 3s. 8d., 3s. 6d., or 3s. 2d., and the surplus-value
-consequently not rise above 3s. 4d., 3s. 6d., or 3s. 10d. The amount of this fall, the lowest limit of
-which is 3 shillings (the new value of labour-power), depends on the relative weight, which the
-pressure of capital on the one side, and the resistance of the labourer on the other, throws into the
-scale.
-The value of labour-power is determined by the value of a given quantity of necessaries. It is the
-value and not the mass of these necessaries that varies with the productiveness of labour. It is,
-however, possible that, owing to an increase of productiveness, both the labourer and the
-capitalist may simultaneously be able to appropriate a greater quantity of these necessaries,
-without any change in the price of labour-power or in surplus-value. If the value of labour-power
-be 3 shillings, and the necessary labour time amount to 6 hours, if the surplus-value likewise be 3
-shillings, and the surplus labour 6 hours, then if the productiveness of labour were doubled
-without altering the ratio of necessary labour to surplus labour, there would be no change of
-magnitude in surplus-value and price of labour-power. The only result would be that each of them
-would represent twice as many use-values as before; these use-values being twice as cheap as
-before. Although labour-power would be unchanged in price, it would be above its value. If,
-however, the price of labour-power had fallen, not to 1s. 6d., the lowest possible point consistent
-with its new value, but to 2s. 10d. or 2s. 6d., still this lower price would represent an increased
-mass of necessaries. In this way it is possible with an increasing productiveness of labour, for the
-price of labour-power to keep on falling, and yet this fall to be accompanied by a constant growth
-in the mass of the labourer's means of subsistence. But even in such case, the fall in the value of
-labour-power would cause a corresponding rise of surplus-value, and thus the abyss between the
-labourer's position and that of the capitalist would keep widening.3
-Ricardo was the first who accurately formulated the three laws we have above stated. But he falls
-into the following errors: (1) he looks upon the special conditions under which these laws hold
-good as the general and sole conditions of capitalist production. He knows no change, either in
-the length of the working day, or in the intensity of labour; consequently with him there can be
-only one variable factor, viz., the productiveness of labour; (2), and this error vitiates his analysis
-much more than (1), he has not, any more than have the other economists, investigated surplus-
-value as such, i.e., independently of its particular forms, such as profit, rent, &c. He therefore
-confounds together the laws of the rate of surplus-value and the laws of the rate of profit. The rate
-of profit is, as we have already said, the ratio of the surplus-value to the total capital advanced;
-the rate of surplus-value is the ratio of the surplus-value to the variable part of that capital.
-Assume that a capital C of £500 is made up of raw material, instruments of labour, &c. (c) to the
-amount of £400; and of wages (v) to the amount of £100; and further, that the surplus-value (s) =
-£100. Then we have rate of surplus-value s/v = £100/£100 = 100%. But the rate of profit s/c =
-£100/£500 = 20%. It is, besides, obvious that the rate of profit may depend on circumstances that
-in no way affect the rate of surplus-value. I shall show in Book III. that, with a given rate of
-368 Chapter 17
-surplus-value, we may have any number of rates of profit, and that various rates of surplus-value
-may, under given conditions, express themselves in a single rate of profit.
-Section 2: Working day Constant. Productiveness of Labour
-Constant. Intensity of Labour Variable
-Increased intensity of labour means increased expenditure of labour in a given time. Hence a
-working day of more intense labour is embodied in more products than is one of less intense
-labour, the length of each day being the same. Increased productiveness of labour also, it is true,
-will supply more products in a given working day. But in this latter case, the value of each single
-product falls, for it costs less labour than before; in the former case, that value remains
-unchanged, for each article costs the same labour as before. Here we have an increase in the
-number of products, unaccompanied by a fall in their individual prices: as their number increases,
-so does the sum of their prices. But in the case of increased productiveness, a given value is
-spread over a greater mass of products. Hence the length of the working day being constant, a
-day's labour of increased intensity will be incorporated in an increased value, and, the value of
-money remaining unchanged, in more money. The value created varies with the extent to which
-the intensity of labour deviates from its normal intensity in the society. A given working day,
-therefore, no longer creates a constant, but a variable value; in a day of 12 hours of ordinary
-intensity, the value created is, say 6 shillings, but with increased intensity, the value created may
-be 7, 8, or more shillings. It is clear that, if the value created by a day's labour increases from,
-say, 6 to 8 shillings then the two parts into which this value is divided, viz., price of labour-power
-and surplus-value, may both of them increase simultaneously, and either equally or unequally.
-They may both simultaneously increase from 3 shillings to 4. Here, the rise in the price of labour-
-power does not necessarily imply that the price has risen above the value of labour-power. On the
-contrary, the rise in price may be accompanied by a fall in value. This occurs whenever the rise in
-the price of labour-power does not compensate for its increased wear and tear.
-We know that, with transitory exceptions, a change in the productiveness of labour does not cause
-any change in the value of labour-power, nor consequently in the magnitude of surplus-value,
-unless the products of the industries affected are articles habitually consumed by the labourers. In
-the present case this condition no longer applies. For when the variation is either in the duration
-or in the intensity of labour, there is always a corresponding change in the magnitude of the value
-created, independently of the nature of the article in which that value is embodied.
-If the intensity of labour were to increase simultaneously and equally in every branch of industry,
-then the new and higher degree of intensity would become the normal degree for the society, and
-would therefore cease to be taken account of. But still, even then, the intensity of labour would be
-different in different countries, and would modify the international application of the law of
-value. The more intense working day of one nation would be represented by a greater sum of
-money than would the less intense day of another nation.4
-Section 3: Productiveness and Intensity of Labour Constant.
-Length of the Working day Variable
-The working day may vary in two ways. It may be made either longer or shorter. From our
-present data, and within the limits of the assumptions made above we obtain the following laws:
-(1.) The working day creates a greater or less amount of value in proportion to its length – thus, a
-variable and not a constant quantity of value.
-369 Chapter 17
-(2.) Every change in the relation between the magnitudes of surplus-value and of the value of
-labour-power arises from a change in the absolute magnitude of the surplus labour, and
-consequently of the surplus-value.
-(3.) The absolute value of labour-power can change only in consequence of the reaction exercised
-by the prolongation of surplus labour upon the wear and tear of labour-power. Every change in
-this absolute value is therefore the effect, but never the cause, of a change in the magnitude of
-surplus-value.
-We begin with the case in which the working day is shortened.
-(1.) A shortening of the working day under the conditions given above, leaves the value of
-labour-power, and with it, the necessary labour time, unaltered. It reduces the surplus labour and
-surplus-value. Along with the absolute magnitude of the latter, its relative magnitude also falls,
-i.e., its magnitude relatively to the value of labour-power whose magnitude remains unaltered.
-Only by lowering the price of labour-power below its value could the capitalist save himself
-harmless.
-All the usual arguments against the shortening of the working day, assume that it takes place
-under the conditions we have here supposed to exist; but in reality the very contrary is the case: a
-change in the productiveness and intensity of labour either precedes, or immediately follows, a
-shortening of the working day.5
-(2.) Lengthening of the working day. Let the necessary labour time be 6 hours, or the value of
-labour-power 3 shillings; also let the surplus labour be 6 hours or the surplus-value 3 shillings.
-The whole working day then amounts to 12 hours and is embodied in a value of 6 shillings. If,
-now, the working day be lengthened by 2 hours and the price of labour-power remain unaltered,
-the surplus-value increases both absolutely and relatively. Although there is no absolute change in
-the value of labour-power, it suffers a relative fall. Under the conditions assumed in 1. there could
-not be a change of relative magnitude in the value of labour-power without a change in its
-absolute magnitude. Here, on the contrary, the change of relative magnitude in the value of
-labour-power is the result of the change of absolute magnitude in surplus-value.
-Since the value in which a day's labour is embodied, increases with the length of that day, it is
-evident that the surplus-value and the price of labour-power may simultaneously increase, either
-by equal or unequal quantities. This simultaneous increase is therefore possible in two cases, one,
-the actual lengthening of the working day, the other, an increase in the intensity of labour
-unaccompanied by such lengthening.
-When the working day is prolonged, the price of labour-power may fall below its value, although
-that price be nominally unchanged or even rise. The value of a day's labour-power is, as will be
-remembered, estimated from its normal average duration, or from the normal duration of life
-among the labourers, and from corresponding normal transformations of organised bodily matter
-into motion,6 in conformity with the nature of man. Up to a certain point, the increased wear and
-tear of labour-power, inseparable from a lengthened working day, may be compensated by higher
-wages. But beyond this point the wear and tear increases in geometrical progression, and every
-condition suitable for the normal reproduction and functioning of labour-power is suppressed.
-The price of labour-power and the degree of its exploitation cease to be commensurable
-quantities.
-370 Chapter 17
-Section 4: Simultaneous Variations in the Duration,
-Productiveness, and Intensity of Labour
-It is obvious that a large number of combinations are here possible. Any two of the factors may
-vary and the third remain constant, or all three may vary at once. They may vary either in the
-same or in different degrees, in the same or in opposite directions, with the result that the
-variations counteract one another, either wholly or in part. Nevertheless the analysis of every
-possible case is easy in view of the results given in I., II., and III. The effect of every possible
-combination may be found by treating each factor in turn as variable, and the other two constant
-for the time being. We shall, therefore, notice, and that briefly, but two important cases.
-A. Diminishing Productiveness of Labour with a
-Simultaneous Lengthening of the Working day
-In speaking of diminishing productiveness of labour, we here refer to diminution in those
-industries whose products determine the value of labour-power; such a diminution, for example,
-as results from decreasing fertility of the soil, and from the corresponding dearness of its
-products. Take the working day at 12 hours and the value created by it at 6 shillings, of which one
-half replaces the value of the labour-power, the other forms the surplus-value. Suppose, in
-consequence of the increased dearness of the products of the soil, that the value of labour-power
-rises from 3 shillings to 4, and therefore the necessary labour time from 6 hours to 8. If there be
-no change in the length of the working day, the surplus labour would fall from 6 hours to 4, the
-surplus-value from 3 shillings to 2. If the day be lengthened by 2 hours, i.e., from 12 hours to 14,
-the surplus labour remains at 6 hours, the surplus-value at 3 shillings*, but the surplus-value
-decreases compared with the value of labour-power, as measured by the necessary labour time. If
-the day be lengthened by 4 hours, viz., from 12 hours to 16, the proportional magnitudes of
-surplus-value and value of labour-power, of surplus labour and necessary labour, continue
-unchanged, but the absolute magnitude of surplus-value rises from 3 shillings to 4, that of the
-surplus labour from 6 hours to 8, an increment of 33 1/3%. Therefore, with diminishing
-productiveness of labour and a simultaneous lengthening of the working day, the absolute
-magnitude of surplus-value may continue unaltered, at the same time that its relative magnitude
-diminishes; its relative magnitude may continue unchanged, at the same time that its absolute
-magnitude increases; and, provided the lengthening of the day be sufficient, both may increase.
-In the period between 1799 and 1815 the increasing price of provisions led in England to a
-nominal rise in wages, although the real wages, expressed in the necessaries of life, fell. From this
-fact West and Ricardo drew the conclusion, that the diminution in the productiveness of
-agricultural labour had brought about a fall in the rate of surplus-value, and they made this
-assumption of a fact that existed only in their imaginations, the starting-point of important
-investigations into the relative magnitudes of wages, profits, and rent. But, as a matter of fact,
-surplus-value had at that time, thanks to the increased intensity of labour, and to the prolongation
-of the working day, increased both in absolute and relative magnitude. This was the period in
-which the right to prolong the hours of labour to an outrageous extent was established; 7 the
-period that was especially characterised by an accelerated accumulation of capital here, by
-pauperism there.8
-371 Chapter 17
-B. Increasing Intensity and Productiveness of Labour with
-Simultaneous Shortening of the Working day
-Increased productiveness and greater intensity of labour, both have a like effect. They both
-augment the mass of articles produced in a given time. Both, therefore, shorten that portion of the
-working day which the labourer needs to produce his means of subsistence or their equivalent.
-The minimum length of the working day is fixed by this necessary but contractile portion of it. If
-the whole working day were to shrink to the length of this portion, surplus labour would vanish, a
-consummation utterly impossible under the régime of capital. Only by suppressing the capitalist
-form of production could the length of the working day be reduced to the necessary labour time.
-But, even in that case, the latter would extend its limits. On the one hand, because the notion of
-“means of subsistence” would considerably expand, and the labourer would lay claim to an
-altogether different standard of life. On the other hand, because a part of what is now surplus
-labour, would then count as necessary labour; I mean the labour of forming a fund for reserve and
-accumulation.
-The more the productiveness of labour increases, the more can the working day be shortened; and
-the more the working day is shortened, the more can the intensity of labour increase. From a
-social point of view, the productiveness increases in the same ratio as the economy of labour,
-which, in its turn, includes not only economy of the means of production, but also the avoidance
-of all useless labour. The capitalist mode of production, while on the one hand, enforcing
-economy in each individual business, on the other hand, begets, by its anarchical system of
-competition, the most outrageous squandering of labour-power and of the social means of
-production, not to mention the creation of a vast number of employments, at present
-indispensable, but in themselves superfluous.
-The intensity and productiveness of labour being given, the time which society is bound to devote
-to material production is shorter, and as a consequence, the time at its disposal for the free
-development, intellectual and social, of the individual is greater, in proportion as the work is more
-and more evenly divided among all the able-bodied members of society, and as a particular class
-is more and more deprived of the power to shift the natural burden of labour from its own
-shoulders to those of another layer of society. In this direction, the shortening of the working day
-finds at last a limit in the generalisation of labour. In capitalist society spare time is acquired for
-one class by converting the whole life-time of the masses into labour time.
-1 Note in the 3rd German edition. — The case considered at pages 321-324 is here of course omitted.
-— F. E.
-2 To this third law MacCulloch has made, amongst others, this absurd addition, that a rise in surplus-
-value, unaccompanied by a fall in the value of labour-power, can occur through the abolition of taxes
-payable by the capitalist. The abolition of such taxes makes no change whatever in the quantity of
-surplus-value that the capitalist extorts at first-hand from the labourer. It alters only the proportion in
-which that surplus-value is divided between himself and third persons. It consequently makes no
-alteration whatever in the relation between surplus-value and value of labour-power. MacCulloch's
-exception therefore proves only his misapprehension of the rule, a misfortune that as often happens to
-him in the vulgarisation of Ricardo, as it does to J. B. Say in the vulgarisation of Adam Smith.
-3 “When an alteration takes place in the productiveness of industry, and that either more or less is
-produced by a given quantity of labour and capital, the proportion of wages may obviously vary,
-372 Chapter 17
-whilst the quantity, which that proportion represents, remains the same, or the quantity may vary,
-whilst the proportion remains the same.” (“Outlines of Political Economy, &c.,” p. 67.)
-4 “All things being equal, the English manufacturer can turn out a considerably larger amount of work
-in a given time than a foreign manufacturer, so much as to counterbalance the difference of the
-working days, between 60 hours a week here, and 72 or 80 elsewhere.” (Rep. of Insp. of Fact. for 31st
-Oct., 1855, p. 65.) The most infallible means for reducing this qualitative difference between the
-English and Continental working hour would be a law shortening quantitatively the length of the
-working day in Continental factories.
-5 “There are compensating circumstances ... which the working of the Ten Hours' Act has brought to
-light.” (“Rep. of Insp. of Fact. for 31st Oct. 1848,” p. 7.)
-6 “The amount of labour which a man had undergone in the course of 24 hours might be
-approximately arrived at by an examination of the chemical changes which had taken place in his
-body, changed forms in matter indicating the anterior exercise of dynamic force.” (Grove: “On the
-Correlation of Physical Forces.”)
-* Earlier English translations have “6 sh.” instead of 3 shillings. This error was pointed out to us by a
-reader, we have investigated and checked with the 1872 German Edition and duly corrected an
-obvious error.
-7 “Corn and labour rarely march quite abreast; but there is an obvious limit, beyond which they cannot
-be separated. With regard to the unusual exertions made by the labouring classes in periods of
-dearness, which produce the fall of wages noticed in the evidence” (namely, before the Parliamentary
-Committee of Inquiry, 1814-15), “they are most meritorious in the individuals, and certainly favour
-the growth of capital. But no man of humanity could wish to see them constant and unremitted. They
-are most admirable as a temporary relief; but if they were constantly in action, effects of a similar kind
-would result from them, as from the population of a country being pushed to the very extreme limits
-of its food.” (Malthus: “Inquiry into the Nature and Progress of Rent,” Lond., 1815, p. 48, note.) All
-honour to Malthus that he lays stress on the lengthening of the hours of labour, a fact to which he
-elsewhere in his pamphlet draws attention, while Ricardo and others, in face of the most notorious
-facts, make invariability in the length of the working day the groundwork of all their investigations.
-But the conservative interests, which Malthus served, prevented him from seeing that an unlimited
-prolongation of the working day, combined with an extraordinary development of machinery, and the
-exploitation of women and children, must inevitably have made a great portion of the working-class
-“supernumerary,” particularly whenever the war should have ceased, and the monopoly of England in
-the markets of the world should have come to an end. It was, of course, far more convenient, and
-much more in conformity with the interests of the ruling classes, whom Malthus adored like a true
-priest, to explain this “over-population” by the eternal laws of Nature, rather than by the historical
-laws of capitalist production.
-8 “A principal cause of the increase of capital, during the war, proceeded from the greater exertions,
-and perhaps the greater privations of the labouring classes, the most numerous in every society. More
-women and children were compelled by necessitous circumstances, to enter upon laborious
-occupations, and former workmen were, from the same cause, obliged to devote a greater portion of
-their time to increase production.” (Essays on Pol. Econ., in which are illustrated the principal causes
-of the present national distress. Lond., 1830, p. 248.)
-Chapter 18: Various Formula for the Rate of
-Surplus-Value
-We have seen that the rate of surplus-value is represented by the following formulae:
-I. Surplus-value
-( s
-) = Surplus-value = Surplus-labour
-Variable Capital v Value of labour-power Necessary labour
-The two first of these formulae represent, as a ratio of values, that which, in the third, is
-represented as a ratio of the times during which those values are produced. These formulae,
-supplementary the one to the other, are rigorously definite and correct. We therefore find them
-substantially, but not consciously, worked out in classical Political Economy. There we meet with
-the following derivative formulae.
-II. Surplus-labour = Surplus-value = Surplus-product
-Working day Value of the Product Total Product
-One and the same ratio is here expressed as a ratio of labour-times, of the values in which those
-labour-times are embodied, and of the products in which those values exist. It is of course
-understood that, by “Value of the Product,” is meant only the value newly created in a working
-day, the constant part of the value of the product being excluded.
-In all of these formulae (II.), the actual degree of exploitation of labour, or the rate of surplus-
-value, is falsely expressed. Let the working day be 12 hours. Then, making the same assumptions
-as in former instances, the real degree of exploitation of labour will be represented in the
-following proportions.
-6 hours surplus-labour = Surplus-value of 3 sh. = 100%
-6 hours necessary labour Variable Capital of 3 sh.
-From formulae II. we get very differently,
-6 hours surplus-labour = Surplus-value of 3 sh. = 50%
-Working day of 12 hours Value created of 6 sh.
-These derivative formulae express, in reality, only the proportion in which the working day, or
-the value produced by it, is divided between capitalist and labourer. If they are to be treated as
-direct expressions of the degree of self-expansion of capital, the following erroneous law would
-hold good: Surplus-labour or surplus-value can never reach 100%.1 Since the surplus-labour is
-only an aliquot part of the working day, or since surplus-value is only an aliquot part of the value
-created, the surplus-labour must necessarily be always less than the working day, or the surplus-
-value always less than the total value created. In order, however, to attain the ratio of 100:100
-they must be equal. In order that the surplus-labour may absorb the whole day (i.e., an average
-day of any week or year), the necessary labour must sink to zero. But if the necessary labour
-vanish, so too does the surplus-labour, since it is only a function of the former. The ratio
-Surplus-labour or Surplus-value
-Working day Value created
-can therefore never reach the limit 100/100, still less rise to 100 + x/100. But not so the rate of
-surplus-value, the real degree of exploitation of labour. Take, e.g., the estimate of L. de Lavergne,
-according to which the English agricultural labourer gets only 1/4, the capitalist (farmer) on the
-other hand 3/4 of the product 2 or its value, apart from the question of how the booty is
-374 Chapter 18
-subsequently divided between the capitalist, the landlord, and others. According to this, this
-surplus-labour of the English agricultural labourer is to his necessary labour as 3:1, which gives a
-rate of exploitation of 300%.
-The favorite method of treating the working day as constant in magnitude became, through the
-use of formulae II., a fixed usage, because in them surplus-labour is always compared with a
-working day of given length. The same holds good when the repartition of the value produced is
-exclusively kept in sight. The working day that has already been realized in given value, must
-necessarily be a day of given length.
-The habit of representing surplus-value and value of labour-power as fractions of the value
-created – a habit that originates in the capitalist mode of production itself, and whose import will
-hereafter be disclosed – conceals the very transaction that characterizes capital, namely the
-exchange of variable capital for living labour-power, and the consequent exclusion of the labourer
-from the product. Instead of the real fact, we have false semblance of an association, in which
-labourer and capitalist divide the product in proportion to the different elements which they
-respectively contribute towards its formation.3
-Moreover, the formulae II. can at any time be reconverted into formulae I. If, for instance, we
-have
-Surplus-labour of 6 hours
-Working day of 12 hours
-then the necessary labour-time being 12 hours less the surplus-labour of 6 hours, we get the
-following result,
-Surplus-labour of 6 hours = 100
-Necessary labour of 6 hours 100
-There is a third formula which I have occasionally already anticipated; it is
-III. Surplus-value = Surplus-labour = Unpaid labour
-Value of labour-power Necessary labour Paid labour
-After the investigations we have given above, it is no longer possible to be misled, by the formula
-Unpaid labour,
-Paid labour
-into concluding, that the capitalist pays for labour and not for labour-power. This formula is only
-a popular expression for
-Surplus-labour,
-Necessary labour
-The capitalist pays the value, so far as price coincides with value, of the labour-power, and
-receives in exchange the disposal of the living labour-power itself. His usufruct is spread over
-two periods. During one the labourer produces a value that is only equal to the value of his
-labour-power; he produces its equivalent. This the capitalist receives in return for his advance of
-the price of the labour-power, a product ready made in the market. During the other period, the
-period of surplus-labour, the usufruct of the labour-power creates a value for the capitalist, that
-costs him no equivalent.4 This expenditure of labour-power comes to him gratis. In this sense it is
-that surplus-labour can be called unpaid labour.
-Capital, therefore, it not only, as Adam Smith says, the command over labour. It is essentially the
-command over unpaid labour. All surplus-value, whatever particular form (profit, interest, or
-375 Chapter 18
-rent), it may subsequently crystallize into, is in substance the materialisation of unpaid labour.
-The secret of the self-expansion of capital resolves itself into having the disposal of a definite
-quantity of other people’s unpaid labour.
-1 Thus, e.g., in “Dritter Brief an v. Kirchmann von Rodbertus. Widerlegung der Ricardo’schen Lehre
-von der Grundrente und Begrundung einer neuen Rententheorie.” Berlin, 1851. I shall return to this
-letter later on; in spite of its erroneous theory of rent, it sees through the nature of capitalist
-production.
-NOTE ADDED IN THE 3RD GERMAN EDITION: It may be seen from this how favorably Marx
-judged his predecessors, whenever he found in them real progress, or new and sound ideas. The
-subsequent publications of Robertus’ letters to Rud. Meyer has shown that the above
-acknowledgement by Marx wants restricting to some extent. In those letters this passage occurs:
-“Capital must be rescued not only from labor, but from itself, and that will be best effected, by treating
-the acts of the industrial capitalist as economic and political functions, that have been delegated to him
-with his capital, and by treating his profit as a form of salary, because we still know no other social
-organisation. But salaries may be regulated, and may also be reduced if they take too much from
-wages. The irruption of Marx into Society, as I may call his book, must be warded off.... Altogether,
-Marx’s book is not so much an investigation into capital, as a polemic against the present form of
-capital, a form which he confounds with the concept itself of capital.”
-("Briefe, &c., von Dr. Robertus-Jagetzow, herausgg. von Dr. Rud. Meyer,” Berlin, 1881, I, Bd. P.111,
-46. Brief von Rodbertus.) To such ideological commonplaces did the bold attack by Robertus in his
-“social letters” finally dwindle down. — F. E.
-2 That part of the product which merely replaces the constant capital advanced is of course left out in
-this calculation. Mr. L. de Lavergne, a blind admirer of England, is inclined to estimate the share of
-the capitalist too low, rather than too high.
-3 All well-developed forms of capitalist production being forms of co-operation, nothing is, of course,
-easier, than to make abstraction from their antagonistic character, and to transform them by a word
-into some form of free association, as is done by A. de Laborde in “De l’Esprit d’Association dans
-tous les intérêts de la communauté". Paris 1818. H. Carey, the Yankee, occasionally performs this
-conjuring trick with like success, even with the relations resulting from slavery.
-4 Although the Physiocrats could not penetrate the mystery of surplus-value, yet this much was clear
-to them, viz., that it is “une richesse indépendante et disponible qu’il (the possessor) n’a point achetée
-et qu’il vend.” [a wealth which is independent and disposable, which he ... has not bought and which
-he sells] (Turgot: “Réflexions sur la Formation et la Distribution des Richesses,” p.11.)
-376
-Part 6: Wages
-377 Chapter 19
-Chapter 19: The Transformation of the Value
-(and Respective Price) of Labour-Power into
-Wages
-On the surface of bourgeois society the wage of the labourer appears as the price of labour, a
-certain quantity of money that is paid for a certain quantity of labour. Thus people speak of the
-value of labour and call its expression in money its necessary or natural price. On the other hand
-they speak of the market-prices of labour, i.e., prices oscillating above or below its natural price.
-But what is the value of a commodity? The objective form of the social labour expended in its
-production. And how do we measure the quantity of this value? By the quantity of the labour
-contained in it. How then is the value, e.g., of a 12 hour working-day to be determined? By the 12
-working-hours contained in a working day of 12 hours, which is an absurd tautology.1
-In order to be sold as a commodity in the market, labour must at all events exist before it is sold.
-But, could the labourer give it an independent objective existence, he would sell a commodity and
-not labour.2
-Apart from these contradictions, a direct exchange of money, i.e., of realized labour, with living
-labour would either do away with the law of value which only begins to develop itself freely on
-the basis of capitalist production, or do away with capitalist production itself, which rests directly
-on wage-labour. The working day of 12 hours embodies itself, e.g., in a money-value of 6s. Either
-equivalents are exchanged, and then the labourer receives 6s, for 12 hours’ labour; the price of his
-labour would be equal to the price of his product. In this case he produces no surplus-value for
-the buyer of his labour, the 6s. are not transformed into capital, the basis of capitalist production
-vanishes. But it is on this very basis that he sells his labour and that his labour is wage-labour. Or
-else he receives for 12 hours’ labour less than 6s., i.e., less than 12 hours’ labour. Twelve hours’
-labour are exchanged against 10, 6, &c., hours’ labour. This equalisation of unequal quantities not
-merely does away with the determination of value. Such a self-destructive contradiction cannot be
-in any way even enunciated or formulated as a law.3
-It is of no avail to deduce the exchange of more labour against less, from their difference of form,
-the one being realized, the other living.4 This is the more absurd as the value of a commodity is
-determined not by the quantity of labour actually realized in it, but by the quantity of living
-labour necessary for its production. A commodity represents, say, 6 working-hours. If an
-invention is made by which it can be produced in 3 hours, the value, even of the commodity
-already produced, falls by half. It represents now 3 hours of social labour instead of the 6
-formerly necessary. It is the quantity of labour required for its production, not the realized form of
-that labour, by which the amount of the value of a commodity is determined.
-That which comes directly face to face with the possessor of money on the market, is in fact not
-labour, but the labourer. What the latter sells is his labour-power. As soon as his labour actually
-begins, it has already ceased to belong to him; it can therefore no longer be sold by him. Labour
-is the substance, and the immanent measure of value, but has itself no value.5
-In the expression “value of labour,” the idea of value is not only completely obliterated, but
-actually reversed. It is an expression as imaginary as the value of the earth. These imaginary
-expressions, arise, however, from the relations of production themselves. They are categories for
-the phenomenal forms of essential relations. That in their appearance things often represent
-themselves in inverted form is pretty well known in every science except Political Economy.6
-378 Chapter 19
-Classical Political Economy borrowed from every-day life the category “price of labour” without
-further criticism, and then simply asked the question, how is this price determined? It soon
-recognized that the change in the relations of demand and supply explained in regard to the price
-of labour, as of all other commodities, nothing except its changes i.e., the oscillations of the
-market-price above or below a certain mean. If demand and supply balance, the oscillation of
-prices ceases, all other conditions remaining the same. But then demand and supply also cease to
-explain anything. The price of labour, at the moment when demand and supply are in equilibrium,
-is its natural price, determined independently of the relation of demand and supply. And how this
-price is determined is just the question. Or a larger period of oscillations in the market-price is
-taken, e.g., a year, and they are found to cancel one the other, leaving a mean average quantity, a
-relatively constant magnitude. This had naturally to be determined otherwise than by its own
-compensating variations. This price which always finally predominates over the accidental
-market-prices of labour and regulates them, this “necessary price” (Physiocrats) or “natural price”
-of labour (Adam Smith) can, as with all other commodities, be nothing else than its value
-expressed in money. In this way Political Economy expected to penetrate athwart the accidental
-prices of labour, to the value of labour. As with other commodities, this value was determined by
-the cost of production. But what is the cost of production ‒ of the labourer, i.e., the cost of
-producing or reproducing the labourer himself? This question unconsciously substituted itself in
-Political Economy for the original one; for the search after the cost of production of labour as
-such turned in a circle and never left the spot. What economists therefore call value of labour, is
-in fact the value of labour-power, as it exists in the personality of the labourer, which is as
-different from its function, labour, as a machine is from the work it performs. Occupied with the
-difference between the market-price of labour and its so-called value, with the relation of this
-value to the rate of profit, and to the values of the commodities produced by means of labour,
-&c., they never discovered that the course of the analysis had led not only from the market-prices
-of labour to its presumed value, but had led to the resolution of this value of labour itself into the
-value of labour-power. Classical economy never arrived at a consciousness of the results of its
-own analysis; it accepted uncritically the categories “value of labour,” “natural price of labour,”
-&c., as final and as adequate expressions for the value-relation under consideration, and was thus
-led, as will be seen later, into inextricable confusion and contradiction, while it offered to the
-vulgar economists a secure basis of operations for their shallowness, which on principle worships
-appearances only.
-Let us next see how value (and price) of labour-power, present themselves in this transformed
-condition as wages.
-We know that the daily value of labour-power is calculated upon a certain length of the labourer’s
-life, to which, again, corresponds a certain length of working day. Assume the habitual working
-day as 12 hours, the daily value of labour-power as 3s., the expression in money of a value that
-embodies 6 hours of labour. If the labourer receives 3s., then he receives the value of his labour-
-power functioning through 12 hours. If, now, this value of a day’s labour-power is expressed as
-the value of a day’s labour itself, we have the formula: Twelve hours’ labour has a value of 3s.
-The value of labour-power thus determines the value of labour, or, expressed in money, its
-necessary price. If, on the other hand, the price of labour-power differs from its value, in like
-manner the price of labour differs from its so-called value.
-As the value of labour is only an irrational expression for the value of labour-power, it follows, of
-course, that the value of labour must always be less than the value it produces, for the capitalist
-always makes labour-power work longer than is necessary for the reproduction of its own value.
-In the above example, the value of the labour-power that functions through 12 hours is 3s., a
-379 Chapter 19
-value for the reproduction of which 6 hours are required. The value which the labour-power
-produces is, on the other hand, 6s., because it, in fact, functions during 12 hours, and the value it
-produces depends, not on its own value, but on the length of time it is in action. Thus, we have a
-result absurd at first sight that labour which creates a value of 6s. possesses a value of 3s.7
-We see, further: The value of 3s. by which a part only of the working day – i.e., 6 hours’ labour-is
-paid for, appears as the value or price of the whole working day of 12 hours, which thus includes
-6 hours unpaid for. The wage form thus extinguishes every trace of the division of the working
-day into necessary labour and surplus labour, into paid and unpaid labour. All labour appears as
-paid labour. In the corvée, the labour of the worker for himself, and his compulsory labour for his
-lord, differ in space and time in the clearest possible way. In slave labour, even that part of the
-working day in which the slave is only replacing the value of his own means of existence, in
-which, therefore, in fact, he works for himself alone, appears as labour for his master. All the
-slave’s labour appears as unpaid labour.8 In wage labour, on the contrary, even surplus labour, or
-unpaid labour, appears as paid. There the property-relation conceals the labour of the slave for
-himself; here the money-relation conceals the unrequited labour of the wage labourer.
-Hence, we may understand the decisive importance of the transformation of value and price of
-labour-power into the form of wages, or into the value and price of labour itself. This phenomenal
-form, which makes the actual relation invisible, and, indeed, shows the direct opposite of that
-relation, forms the basis of all the juridical notions of both labourer and capitalist, of all the
-mystifications of the capitalistic mode of production, of all its illusions as to liberty, of all the
-apologetic shifts of the vulgar economists.
-If history took a long time to get at the bottom of the mystery of wages, nothing, on the other
-hand, is more easy to understand than the necessity, the raison d’etre, of this phenomenon.
-The exchange between capital and labour at first presents itself to the mind in the same guise as
-the buying and selling of all other commodities. The buyer gives a certain sum of money, the
-seller an article of a nature different from money. The jurist’s consciousness recognizes in this, at
-most, a material difference, expressed in the juridically equivalent formula: “Do ut des, do ut
-facias, facio ut des, facio ut facias.” 9
-Furthermore, exchange-value and use-value, being intrinsically incommensurable magnitudes, the
-expressions “value of labour,” “price of labour,” do not seem more irrational than the expressions
-“value of cotton,” “price of cotton.” Moreover, the labourer is paid after he has given his labour.
-In its function of means of payment, money realizes subsequently the value or price of the article
-supplied – i.e., in this particular case, the value or price of the labour supplied. Finally, the use-
-value supplied by the labourer to the capitalist is not, in fact, his labour-power, but its function,
-some definite useful labour, the work of tailoring, shoemaking, spinning, &c. That this same
-labour is, on the other hand, the universal value-creating element, and thus possesses a property
-by which it differs from all other commodities, is beyond the cognizance of the ordinary mind.
-Let us put ourselves in the place of the labourer who receives for 12 hours’ labour, say the value
-produced by 6 hours’ labour, say 3s. For him, in fact, his 12 hours’ labour is the means of buying
-the 3s. The value of his labour-power may vary, with the value of his usual means of subsistence,
-from 3 to 4 shillings, or from 3 to 2 shillings; or, if the value of his labour-power remains
-constant, its price may, in consequence of changing relations of demand and supply, rise to 4s. or
-fall to 2s. He always gives 12 hours of labour. Every change in the amount of the equivalent that
-he receives appears to him, therefore, necessarily as a change in the value or price of his 12
-hours’ work. This circumstance misled Adam Smith, who treated the working day as a constant
-quantity,10 to the assertion that the value of labour is constant, although the value of the means of
-380 Chapter 19
-subsistence may vary, and the same working day, therefore, may represent itself in more or less
-money for the labourer.
-Let us consider, on the other hand, the capitalist. He wishes to receive as much labour as possible
-for as little money as possible. Practically, therefore, the only thing that interests him is the
-difference between the price of labour-power and the value which its function creates. But, then,
-he tries to buy all commodities as cheaply as possible, and always accounts for his profit by
-simple cheating, by buying under, and selling over the value. Hence, he never comes to see that,
-if such a thing as the value of labour really existed, and he really paid this value, no capital would
-exist, his money would not be turned into capital.
-Moreover, the actual movement of wages presents phenomena which seem to prove that not the
-value of labour-power is paid, but the value of its function, of labour itself. We may reduce these
-phenomena to two great classes: 1.) Change of wages with the changing length of the working
-day. One might as well conclude that not the value of a machine is paid, but that of its working,
-because it costs more to hire a machine for a week than for a day. 2.) The individual difference in
-the wages of different labourers who do the same kind of work. We find this individual
-difference, but are not deceived by it, in the system of slavery, where, frankly and openly, without
-any circumlocution, labour-power itself is sold. Only, in the slave system, the advantage of a
-labour-power above the average, and the disadvantage of a labour-power below the average,
-affects the slave-owner; in the wage-labour system, it affects the labourer himself, because his
-labour-power is, in the one case, sold by himself, in the other, by a third person.
-For the rest, in respect to the phenomenal form, “value and price of labour,” or “wages,” as
-contrasted with the essential relation manifested therein, viz., the value and price of labour-
-power, the same difference holds that holds in respect to all phenomena and their hidden
-substratum. The former appear directly and spontaneously as current modes of thought; the latter
-must first be discovered by science. Classical Political Economy nearly touches the true relation
-of things, without, however, consciously formulating it. This it cannot, so long as it sticks in its
-bourgeois skin.
-1 “Mr.Ricardo ingeniously enough avoids a difficulty which, on a first view, threatens to encumber his
-doctrine — that value depends on the quantity of labour employed in production. If this principle is
-rigidly adhered to, it follows that the value of labour depends on the quantity of labour employed in
-producing it — which is evidently absurd. By a dexterous turn, therefore, Mr. Ricardo makes the
-value of labour depend on the quantity of labour required to produce wages; or, to give him the benefit
-of his own language, he maintains, that the value of labour is to be estimated by the quantity of labour
-required to produce wages; by which he means the quantity of labour required to produce the money
-or commodities given to the labourer. This is similar to saying, that the value of cloth is estimated, not
-by the quantity of labour bestowed on its production, but by the quantity of labour bestowed on the
-production of the silver, for which the cloth is exchanged.” — “A Critical Dissertation on the Nature,
-&c., of Value,” pp. 50, 51.
-2 “If you call labour a commodity, it is not like a commodity which is first produced in order to
-exchange, and then brought to market where it must exchange with other commodities according to
-the respective quantities of each which there may be in the market at the time; labour is created the
-moment it is brought to market; nay, it is brought to market before it is created.” — “Observations on
-Certain Verbal Disputes,” &c., pp. 75, 76.
-3 “Treating labour as a commodity, and capital, the produce of labour, as another, then, if the values of
-these two commodities were regulated by equal quantities of labour, a given amount of labour would
-381 Chapter 19
-... exchange for that quantity of capital which had been produced by the same amount of labour;
-antecedent labour would ... exchange for the same amount as present labour. But the value of labour in
-relation to other commodities ... is determined not by equal quantities of labour.” — E. G. Wakefield
-in his edition of Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations,” Vol. I., London, 1836, p. 231, note.
-4 “There has to be a new agreement” (a new edition of the social contract!) “that whenever there is an
-exchange of work done for work to be done, the latter” (the capitalist) “is to receive a higher value
-than the former” (the worker). — Simonde (de Sismondi), “De la Richesse Commerciale,” Geneva,
-1803, Vol I, p. 37.
-5 “Labour the exclusive standard of value ... the creator of all wealth, no commodity.” Thomas
-Hodgskin, “Popul. Polit. Econ.,” p. 186.
-6 On the other hand, the attempt to explain such expressions as merely poetic license only shows the
-impotence of the analysis. Hence, in answer to Proudhon’s phrase; “Labour is called value, not as
-being a commodity itself, but in view of the values supposed to be potentially embodied in it. The
-value of labour is a figurative expression,” &c. I have remarked: “In labour, commodity, which is a
-frightful reality, he (Proudhon) sees nothing but a grammatical ellipsis. The whole of existing society,
-then, based upon labour commodity, is henceforth based upon a poetic license, on a figurative
-expression. Does society desire to eliminate all the inconveniences which trouble it, it has only to
-eliminate all the ill-sounding terms. Let it change the language, and for that it has only to address itself
-to the Academy and ask it for a new edition of its dictionary.” (Karl Marx, “Misère de la Philosophie,”
-pp. 34, 35.) It is naturally still more convenient to understand by value nothing at all. Then one can
-without difficulty subsume everything under this category. Thus, e.g., J. B. Say: “What is value?”
-Answer: “That which a thing is worth"; and what is “price"? Answer: “The value of a thing expressed
-in money.” And why has agriculture a value? Answer: “Because one sets a price on it.” Therefore
-value is what a thing is worth, and the land has its “value,” because its value is “expressed in money.”
-This is, anyhow, a very simple way of explaining the why and the wherefore of things.
-7 Cf. “Zur Kritik &c.,” p. 40, where I state that, in the portion of that work that deals with Capital, this
-problem will be solved: “How does production, on the basis of exchange-value determined simply by
-labour-time, lead to the result that the exchange-value of labour is less than the exchange-value of its
-product?”
-8 The “Morning Star,” a London Free-trade organ, naif to silliness, protested again and again during
-the American Civil War, with all the moral indignation of which man is capable, that the Negro in the
-“Confederate States” worked absolutely for nothing. It should have compared the daily cost of such a
-Negro with that of the free workman in the East-end of London.
-9 I give in order that you may give; I give in order that you may produce; I produce so that you may
-give; I produce so that you may produce.
-10 Adam Smith only accidentally alludes to the variation of the working day when he is referring to
-piece-wages.
-Chapter 20: Time-Wages
-Wages themselves again take many forms, a fact not recognizable in the ordinary economic
-treatises which, exclusively interested in the material side of the question, neglect every
-difference of form. An exposition of all these forms however, belongs to the special study of
-wage labour, not therefore to this work. Still the two fundamental forms must be briefly worked
-out here.
-The sale of labour-power, as will be remembered, takes place for a definite period of time. The
-converted form under which the daily, weekly, &c., value of labour-power presents itself, is
-hence that of time-wages, therefore day-wages, &c.
-Next it is to be noted that the laws set forth, in the 17th chapter, on the changes in the relative
-magnitudes of price of labour-power and surplus-value, pass by a simple transformation of form,
-into laws of wages. Similarly the distinction between the exchange-value of labour power, and the
-sum of the necessaries of life into which this value is converted, now reappears as the distinction
-between nominal and real wages. It would be useless to repeat here, with regard to the
-phenomenal form, what has been already worked out in the substantial form. We limit ourselves
-therefore to a few points characteristic of time-wages.
-The sum of money1 which the labourer receives for his daily or weekly labour, forms the amount
-of his nominal wages, or of his wages estimated in value. But it is clear that according to the
-length of the working day, that is, according to the amount of actual labour daily supplied, the
-same daily or weekly wage may represent very different prices of labour, i.e., very different sums
-of money for the same quantity of labour.2 We must, therefore, in considering time-wages, again
-distinguish between the sum-total of the daily or weekly wages, &c., and the price of labour. How
-then, to find this price, i.e., the money-value of a given quantity of labour? The average price of
-labour is found, when the average daily value of the labour-power is divided by the average
-number of hours in the working day. If, e.g., the daily value of labour-power is 3 shillings, the
-value of the product of 6 working-hours, and if the working day is 12 hours, the price of 1
-working hour is 3/12 shillings = 3d. The price of the working-hour thus found serves as the unit
-measure for the price of labour.
-It follows therefore that the daily and weekly wages, &c., may remain the same, although the
-price of labour falls constantly. If, e.g., the habitual working day is 10 hours and the daily value
-of the labour-power 3s., the price of the working-hour is 3 3/5d. It falls to 3s. as soon as the
-working day rises to 12 hours, to 2 2/5d as soon as it rises to 15 hours. Daily or weekly wages
-remain, despite all this, unchanged. On the contrary, the daily or weekly wages may rise, although
-the price of labour remains constant or even falls. If, e.g., the working day is 10 hours, and the
-daily value of labour-power 3 shillings, the price of one working-hour is 3 3/5d. If the labourer, in
-consequence of increase of trade, works 12 hours, the price of labour remaining the same, his
-daily wage now rises to 3 shillings 7 1/5 d. without any variation in the price of labour. The same
-result might follow if, instead of the extensive amount of labour, its intensive amount increased.
-3The rise of the nominal daily or weekly wages may therefore be accompanied by a price of
-labour that remains stationary or falls. The same holds as to the income of the labourer’s family,
-as soon as the quantity of labour expended by the head of the family is increased by the labour of
-the members of his family. There are, therefore, methods of lowering the price of labour
-independent of the reduction of the nominal daily or weekly wages.4
-383 Chapter 20
-As a general law it follows that, given the amount of daily or weekly labour, &c., the daily or
-weekly wages depend on the price of labour which itself varies either with the value of labour-
-power, or with the difference between its price and its value. Given, on the other hand, the price
-of labour, the daily or weekly wages depend on the quantity of the daily or weekly labour.
-The unit-measure for time-wages, the price of the working-hour, is the quotient of the value of a
-day’s labour-power, divided by the number of hours of the average working day. Let the latter be
-12 hours, and the daily value of labour-power 3 shillings, the value of the product of 6 hours of
-labour. Under these circumstances the price of a working hour is 3d.; the value produced in it is
-6d. If the labourer is now employed less than 12 hours (or less than 6 days in the week), e.g., only
-6 or 8 hours, he receives, with this price of labour, only 2s. or 1s. 6d. a day.5 As on our hypothesis
-he must work on the average 6 hours daily, in order to produce a day’s wage corresponding
-merely to the value of his labour power, as according to the same hypothesis he works only half
-of every hour for himself, and half for the capitalist, it is clear that he cannot obtain for himself
-the value of the product of 6 hours if he is employed less than 12 hours. In previous chapters we
-saw the destructive consequences of over-work; here we find the sources of the sufferings that
-result to the labourer from his insufficient employment.
-If the hour’s wage is fixed so that the capitalist does not bind himself to pay a day’s or a week’s
-wage, but only to pay wages for the hours during which he chooses to employ the labourer, he
-can employ him for a shorter time than that which is originally the basis of the calculation of the
-hour-wage, or the unit-measure of the price of labour. Since this unit is determined by the ratio
-daily value of labour-power
-working day of a given number of hours’
-it, of course, loses all meaning as soon as the working day ceases to contain a definite number of
-hours. The connection between the paid and the unpaid labour is destroyed. The capitalist can
-now wring from the labour a certain quantity of surplus labour without allowing him the labour-
-time necessary for his own subsistence. He can annihilate all regularity of employment, and
-according to his own convenience, caprice, and the interest of the moment, make the most
-enormous overwork alternate with relative or absolute cessation of work. He can, under the
-pretense of paying “the normal price of labour,” abnormally lengthen the working day without
-any corresponding compensation to the labourer. Hence the perfectly rational revolt in 1860 of
-the London labourers, employed in the building trades, against the attempt of the capitalists to
-impose on them this sort of wage by the hour. The legal limitation of the working day puts an end
-to such mischief, although not, of course, to the diminution of employment caused by the
-competition of machinery, by changes in the quality of the labourers employed, and by crises
-partial or general.
-With an increasing daily or weekly wage the price of labour may remain nominally constant, and
-yet may fall below its normal level. This occurs every time that, the price of labour (reckoned per
-working-hour) remaining constant, the working day is prolonged beyond its customary length. If
-in the fraction:
-daily value of labour power
-working day
-the denominator increases, the numerator increases yet more rapidly. The value of labour-power,
-as dependent on its wear and tear, increases with the duration of its functioning, and in more rapid
-proportion than the increase of that duration. In many branches of industry where time-wage is
-the general rule without legal limits to the working-time, the habit has, therefore, spontaneously
-grown up of regarding the working day as normal only up to a certain point, e.g., up to the
-384 Chapter 20
-expiration of the tenth hour (“normal working day,” “the day’s work,” “the regular hours of
-work”). Beyond this limit the working-time is over-time, and is, taking the hour as unit-measure,
-paid better (“extra pay”), although often in a proportion ridiculously small.6 The normal working
-day exists here as a fraction of the actual working day, and the latter, often during the whole year,
-lasts longer than the former.7 The increase in the price of labour with the extension of the
-working day beyond a certain normal limit, takes such a shape in various British industries that
-the low price of labour during the so-called normal time compels the labourer to work during the
-better paid over-time, if he wishes to obtain a sufficient wage at all.8 Legal limitation of the
-working day puts an end to these amenities.9
-It is a fact generally known that, the longer the working days, in any branch of industry, the lower
-are the wages.10 A. Redgrave, factory inspector, illustrates this by a comparative review of the 20
-years from 1839-1859, according to which wages rose in the factories under the 10 Hours Law,
-whilst they fell in the factories in which the work lasted 14 to 15 hours daily.11
-From the law, “the price of labour being given, the daily or weekly wage depends on the quantity
-of labour expended,” it follows, first of all, that the lower the price of labour, the greater must be
-the quantity of labour, or the longer must be the working day for the labourer to secure even a
-miserable average wage. The lowness of the price of labour acts here as a stimulus to the
-extension of the labour-time.12
-On the other hand, the extension of the working-time produces, in its turn, a fall in the price of
-labour, and with this a fall in the day’s or week’s wages.
-The determination of the price of labour by:
-daily value of labour power
-working day of a given number of hours
-shows that a mere prolongation of the working day lowers the price of labour, if no compensation
-steps in. But the same circumstances which allow the capitalist in the long run to prolong the
-working day, also allow him first, and compel him finally, to nominally lower the price of labour
-until the total price of the increased number of hours is lowered, and, therefore, the daily or
-weekly wage. Reference to two circumstances is sufficient here. If one man does the work of 1½
-or 2 men, the supply of labour increases, although the supply of labour-power on the market
-remains constant. The competition thus created between the labourers allows the capitalist to beat
-down the price of labour, whilst the falling price of labour allows him, on the other hand, to screw
-up still further the working-time.13 Soon, however, this command over abnormal quantities of
-unpaid labour, i.e., quantities in excess of the average social amount, becomes a source of
-competition amongst the capitalists themselves. A part of the price of the commodity consists of
-the price of labour. The unpaid part of the labour-price need not be reckoned in the price of the
-commodity. It may be presented to the buyer. This is the first step to which competition leads.
-The second step to which it drives is to exclude also from the selling price of the commodity at
-least a part of the abnormal surplus-value created by the extension of the working day. In this
-way, an abnormally low selling price of the commodity arises, at first sporadically, and becomes
-fixed by degrees; a lower selling price which henceforward becomes the constant basis of a
-miserable wage for an excessive working-time, as originally it was the product of these very
-circumstances. This movement is simply indicated here, as the analysis of competition does not
-belong to this part of our subject. Nevertheless, the capitalist may, for a moment, speak for
-himself. “In Birmingham there is so much competition of masters one against another that many
-are obliged to do things as employers that they would otherwise be ashamed of; and yet no more
-money is made, but only the public gets the benefit.”14 The reader will remember the two sorts of
-385 Chapter 20
-London bakers, of whom one sold the bread at its full price (the “full-priced” bakers), the other
-below its normal price (“the under-priced,” “the undersellers”). The “full-priced” denounced their
-rivals before the Parliamentary Committee of Inquiry: “They only exist now by first defrauding
-the public, and next getting 18 hours’ work out of their men for 12 hours’ wages.... The unpaid
-labour of the men was made ... the source whereby the competition was carried on, and continues
-so to this day.... The competition among the master bakers is the cause of the difficulty in getting
-rid of night-work. An underseller, who sells his bread below the cost-price according to the price
-of flour, must make it up by getting more out of the labour of the men.... If I got only 12 hours’
-work out of my men, and my neighbor got 18 or 20, he must beat me in the selling price. If the
-men could insist on payment for over-work, this would be set right.... A large number of those
-employed by the undersellers are foreigners and youths, who are obliged to accept almost any
-wages they can obtain.”15
-This jeremiad is also interesting because it shows how the appearance only of the relations of
-production mirrors itself in the brain of the capitalist. The capitalist does not know that the
-normal price of labour also includes a definite quantity of unpaid labour, and that this very unpaid
-labour is the normal source of his gain. The category of surplus labour-time does not exist at all
-for him, since it is included in the normal working day, which he thinks he has paid for in the
-day’s wages. But over-time does exist for him, the prolongation of the working day beyond the
-limits corresponding with the usual price of labour. Face to face with his underselling competitor,
-he even insists upon extra pay for this over-time. He again does not know that this extra pay
-includes unpaid labour, just as well as does the price of the customary hour of labour. For
-example, the price of one hour of the 12 hours’ working day is 3d., say the value-product of half a
-working-hour, whilst the price of the over-time working-hour is 4d., or the value-product of 2/3
-of a working hour. In the first case the capitalist appropriates to himself one-half, in the second,
-one-third of the working-hour without paying for it.
-1 The value of money itself is here always supposed constant.
-2 “The price of labour is the sum paid for a given quantity of labour.” (Sir Edward West, “Price of
-Corn and Wages of Labour,” London, 1836, p. 67.) West is the author of the anonymous “Essay on
-the Application of Capital to Land.” by a Fellow of the University College of Oxford, London, 1815.
-An epoch-making work in the history of Political Economy.
-3 “The wages of labour depend upon the price of labour and the quantity of labour performed.... An
-increase in the wages of labour does not necessarily imply an enhancement of the price of labour.
-From fuller employment, and greater exertions, the wages of labour may be considerably increased,
-while the price of labour may continue the same.” (West, op. cit., pp. 67, 68, 112.) The main question:
-“How is the price of labour determined?” West, however, dismisses with mere banalities.
-4 This is perceived by the fanatical representative of the industrial bourgeoisie of the 18th century, the
-author of the “Essay on Trade and Commerce” often quoted by us, although he puts the matter in a
-confused way: “It is the quantity of labour and not the price of it” (he means by this the nominal daily
-or weekly wages) “that is determined by the price of provisions and other necessaries: reduce the price
-of necessaries very low, and of course you reduce the quantity of labour in proportion. Master
-manufacturers know that there are various ways of raising and felling the price of labour, besides that
-of altering its nominal amount.” (op. cit., pp. 48, 61.) In his “Three Lectures on the Rate of Wages,”
-London, 1830, in which N. W. Senior uses West’s work without mentioning it, he says: “The labourer
-is principally interested in the amount of wages” (p. 14), that is to say, the labourer is principally
-386 Chapter 20
-interested in what he receives, the nominal sum of his wages, not in that which he gives, the amount of
-labour!
-5 The effect of such an abnormal lessening of employment is quite different from that of a general
-reduction of the working day, enforced by law. The former has nothing to do with the absolute length
-of the working day, and may occur just as well in a working day of 15, as of 6 hours. The normal price
-of labour is in the first case calculated on the labourer working 15 hours, in the second case on his
-working 6 hours a day on the average. The result is therefore the same, if he in the one case is
-employed only for 7½, in the other only for 3 hours.
-6 “The rate of payment for overtime (in lace-making) is so small, from ½ d. and ¾ d. to 2d. per hour,
-that it stands in painful contrast to the amount of injury produced to the health and stamina of the
-workpeople.... The small amount thus earned is also often obliged to be spent in extra nourishment.”
-(“Child.Empl.Com., II. Rep.,” p. xvi., n. 117.)
-7 E.g., in paper-staining before the recent introduction into this trade of the Factory Act. “We work on
-with no stoppage for meals, so that the day’s work of 10½ hours is finished by 4:30 p.m., and all after
-that is over-time, and we seldom leave off working before 6 p.m., so that we are really working over-
-time the whole year round.” (Mr. Smith’s “Evidence in Child. Empl. Com., 1. Rep.,” p. 125.)
-8 E.g., in the Scotch bleaching-works. “In some parts of Scotland this trade” (before the introduction
-of the Factory Act in 1862) “was carried on by a system of over-time, i.e., ten hours a day were the
-regular hours of work, for which a nominal wage of 1s. 2d. per day was paid to a man, there being
-every day over-time for three or four hours, paid at the rate of 3d. per hour. The effect of this system
-... a man could not earn more than 8s. per week when working the ordinary hours ... without over-time
-they could not earn a fair day’s wages.” (“Rept. of Insp. of Factories,” April 30th, 1863, p. 10.) “The
-higher wages, for getting adult males to work longer hours, are a temptation too strong to be resisted.”
-(“Rept. of Insp. of Fact.,” April 30th, 1848, p. 5.) The book-binding trade in the city of London
-employs very many young girls from 14 to 15 years old, and that under indentures which prescribe
-certain definite hours of labour. Nevertheless, they work in the last week of each month until 10, 11,
-12, or 1 o’clock at night, along with the older labourers, in a very mixed company. “The masters tempt
-them by extra pay and supper,” which they eat in neighboring public houses. The great debauchery
-thus produced among these “young immortals” (“Children’s Employment Comm., V. Rept.,” p. 44, n.
-191) is compensated by the fact that among the rest many Bibles and religious books are bound by
-them.
-9 See “Reports of lnsp. of Fact.,” 30th April, 1863, p. 10. With very accurate appreciation of the state
-of things, the London labourers employed in the building trades declared, during the great strike and
-lock-out of 1860, that they would only accept wages by the hour under two conditions: (1), that, with
-the price of the working-hour, a normal working day of 9 and 10 hours respectively should be fixed,
-and that the price of the hour for the 10 hours’ working day should be higher than that for the hour of
-the 9 hours working day; (2), that every hour beyond the normal working day should be reckoned as
-over-time and proportionally more highly paid.
-10 “It is a very notable thing, too, that where long hours are the rule, small wages are also so.”
-(“Report of Insp. of Fact.,” 31st. Oct., 1863, p. 9.) “The work which obtains the scanty pittance of
-food, is, for the most part, excessively prolonged.” (“Public Health, Sixth Report,” 1864, p. 15.)
-11 “Report of Inspectors of Fact.,” 30th April, 1860, pp. 31, 32.
-12 The hand nail-makers in England, e.g., have, on account of the low price of labour, to work 15
-hours a day in order to hammer out their miserable weekly wage. “It’s a great many hours in a day (6
-a.m. to 8 p.m.), and he has to work hard all the time to get 11 d. or 1s., and there is the wear of the
-tools, the cost of firing, and something for waste iron to go out of this, which takes off altogether 2½d.
-387 Chapter 20
-or 3d.” (“Children’s Employment Com., III. Report,” p. 136, n. 671.) The women earn by the same
-working-time a week’s wage of only 5 shillings. (l.c., p. 137, n. 674.)
-13 If a factory-hand, e.g., refused to work the customary long hours, “he would very shortly be
-replaced by somebody who would work any length of time, and thus be thrown out of employment.”
-(“Reports of Inspectors of Factories,” 30th April, 1848. Evidence, p. 39, n. 58.) “If one man performs
-the work of two... the rate of profits will generally be raised ... in consequence of the additional supply
-of labour having diminished its price.” (Senior, l.c., p. 15.)
-14 “Children’s Employment Com., III Rep.,” Evidence, p. 66, n. 22.
-15 “Report, &c., Relative to the Grievances Complained of by the Journeymen Bakers.” London, 1862,
-p. 411, and ib. Evidence, notes 479, 359, 27. Anyhow the full-priced bakers, as was mentioned above,
-and as their spokesman, Bennett, himself admits, make their men “generally begin work at 11 p.m. ...
-up to 8 o’clock the next morning.... They are then engaged all day long ... as late as 7 o’clock in the
-evening.” (l.c., p. 22.)
-Chapter 21: Piece Wages
-Wages by the piece are nothing else than a converted form of wages by time, just as wages by
-time are a converted form of the value or price of labour-power.
-In piece wages it seems at first sight as if the use-value bought from the labourer was, not the
-function of his labour-power, living labour, but labour already realized in the product, and as if
-the price of this labour was determined, not as with time-wages, by the fraction
-daily value of labour-power
-the working day of a given number of hours
-but by the capacity for work of the producer.1
-The confidence that trusts in this appearance ought to receive a first severe shock from
-the fact that both forms of wages exist side by side, simultaneously, in the same branches
-of industry; e.g.,
-“the compositors of London, as a general rule, work by the piece, time-work being
-the exception, while those in the country work by the day, the exception being
-work by the piece. The shipwrights of the port of London work by the job or
-piece, while those of all other parts work by the day.”2
-In the same saddlery shops of London, often for the same work, piece wages are paid to the
-French, time-wages to the English. In the regular factories in which throughout piece wages
-predominate, particular kinds of work are unsuitable to this form of wage, and are therefore paid
-by time.3 But it is, moreover, self-evident that the difference of form in the payment of wages
-alters in no way their essential nature, although the one form may be more favorable to the
-development of capitalist production than the other.
-Let the ordinary working day contain 12 hours of which 6 are paid, 6 unpaid. Let its value-
-product be 6 shillings, that of one hour’s labour therefore 6d. Let us suppose that, as the result of
-experience, a labourer who works with the average amount of intensity and skill, who, therefore,
-gives in fact only the time socially necessary to the production of an article, supplies in 12 hours
-24 pieces, either distinct products or measurable parts of a continuous whole. Then the value of
-these 24 pieces, after. subtraction of the portion of constant capital contained in them, is 6
-shillings, and the value of a single piece 3d. The labourer receives 1 ½d. per piece, and thus earns
-in 12 hours 3 shillings. Just as, with time-wages, it does not matter whether we assume that the
-labourer works 6 hours for himself and 6 hours for the capitalist, or half of every hour for himself,
-and the other half for the capitalist, so here it does not matter whether we say that each individual
-piece is half paid, and half unpaid for, or that the price of 12 pieces is the equivalent only of the
-value of the labour-power, whilst in the other 12 pieces surplus-value is incorporated.
-The form of piece wages is just as irrational as that of time-wages. Whilst in our example two
-pieces of a commodity, after subtraction of the value of the means of production consumed in
-them, are worth 6d. as being the product of one hour, the labourer receives for them a price of 3d.
-Piece wages do not, in fact, distinctly express any relation of value. It is not, therefore, a question
-of measuring the value of the piece by the working-time incorporated in it, but on the contrary, of
-measuring the working-time the labourer has expended by the number of pieces he has produced.
-In time-wages, the labour is measured by its immediate duration; in piece wages, by the quantity
-of products in which the labour has embodied itself during a given time.4 The price of labour time
-389 Chapter 21
-itself is finally determined by the equation: value of a day’s labour = daily value of labour-power.
-Piece-wage is, therefore, only a modified form of time-wage.
-Let us now consider a little more closely the characteristic peculiarities of piece wages.
-The quality of the labour is here controlled by the work itself, which must be of average
-perfection if the piece-price is to be paid in full. Piece wages become, from this point of view, the
-most fruitful source of reductions of wages and capitalistic cheating.
-They furnish to the capitalist an exact measure for the intensity of labour. Only the working-time
-which is embodied in a quantum of commodities determined beforehand, and experimentally
-fixed, counts as socially necessary working-time, and is paid as such. In the larger workshops of
-the London tailors, therefore, a certain piece of work, a waistcoat, e.g., is called an hour, or half
-an hour, the hour at 6d. By practice it is known how much is the average product of one hour.
-With new fashions, repairs, &c., a contest arises between master and labourer as to whether a
-particular piece of work is one hour, and so on, until here also experience decides. Similarly in
-the London furniture workshops, &c. If the labourer does not possess the average capacity, if he
-cannot in consequence supply a certain minimum of work per day, he is dismissed.5
-Since the quality and intensity of the work are here controlled by the form of wage itself,
-superintendence of labour becomes in great part superfluous. Piece wages therefore lay the
-foundation of the modern “domestic labour,” described above, as well as of a hierarchically
-organized system of exploitation and oppression. The latter has two fundamental forms. On the
-one hand, piece wages facilitate the interposition of parasites between the capitalist and the wage-
-labourer, the “sub-letting of labour.” The gain of these middlemen comes entirely from the
-difference between the labour-price which the capitalist pays, and the part of that price which
-they actually allow to reach the labourer.6 In England this system is characteristically called the
-“sweating system.” On the other hand, piece-wage allows the capitalist to make a contract for so
-much per piece with the head labourer – in manufactures with the chief of some group, in mines
-with the extractor of the coal, in the factory with the actual machine-worker – at a price for which
-the head labourer himself undertakes the enlisting and payment of his assistant work people. The
-exploitation of the labourer by capital is here effected through the exploitation of the labourer by
-the labourer.7
-Given piece-wage, it is naturally the personal interest of the labourer to strain his labour-power as
-intensely as possible; this enables the capitalist to raise more easily the normal degree of intensity
-of labour.8 It is moreover now the personal interest of the labourer to lengthen the working day,
-since with it his daily or weekly wages rise.9 This gradually brings on a reaction like that already
-described in time-wages, without reckoning that the prolongation of the working day, even if the
-piece wage remains constant, includes of necessity a fall in the price of the labour.
-In time-wages, with few exceptions, the same wage holds for the same kind of work, whilst in
-piece wages, though the price of the working time is measured by a certain quantity of product,
-the day’s or week’s wage will vary with the individual differences of the labourers, of whom one
-supplies in a given time the minimum of product only, another the average, a third more than the
-average. With regard to actual receipts there is, therefore, great variety according to the different
-skill, strength, energy, staying-power, &c., of the individual labourers.10 Of course this does not
-alter the general relations between capital and wage-labour. First, the individual differences
-balance one another in the workshop as a whole, which thus supplies in a given working-time the
-average product, and the total wages paid will be the average wages of that particular branch of
-industry. Second, the proportion between wages and surplus-value remains unaltered, since the
-mass of surplus labour supplied by each particular labourer corresponds with the wage received
-by him. But the wider scope that piece-wage gives to individuality tends to develop on the one
-390 Chapter 21
-hand that individuality, and with it the sense of liberty, independence, and self-control of the
-labourers, and on the other, their competition one with another. Piece-work has, therefore, a
-tendency, while raising individual wages above the average, to lower this average itself. But
-where a particular rate of piece-wage has for a long time been fixed by tradition, and its lowering,
-therefore, presented especial difficulties, the masters, in such exceptional cases, sometimes had
-recourse to its compulsory transformation into time-wages. Hence, e.g., in 1860 a great strike
-among the ribbon-weavers of Coventry.11 Piece-wage is finally one of the chief supports of the
-hour-system described in the preceding chapter.12
-From what has been shown so far, it follows that piece-wage is the form of wages most in
-harmony with the capitalist mode of production. Although by no means new – it figures side by
-side with time-wages officially in the French and English labour statutes of the 14th century – it
-only conquers a larger field for action during the period of manufacture, properly so-called. In the
-stormy youth of modern industry, especially from 1797 to 1815, it served as a lever for the
-lengthening of the working day, and the lowering of wages. Very important materials for the
-fluctuation of wages during that period are to be found in the Blue books: “Report and Evidence
-from the Select Committee on Petitions respecting the Corn Laws” (Parliamentary Session of
-1813-14), and “Report from the Lords’ Committee, on the State of the Growth, Commerce, and
-Consumption of Grain, and all Laws relating thereto” (Session of 1814-15). Here we find
-documentary evidence of the constant lowering of the price of labour from the beginning of the
-anti-Jacobin War. In the weaving industry, e.g., piece wages had fallen so low that, in spite of the
-very great lengthening of the working day, the daily wages were then lower than before.
-“The real earnings of the cotton weaver are now far less than they were; his
-superiority over the common labourer, which at first was very great, has now
-almost entirely ceased. Indeed... the difference in the wages of skillful and
-common labour is far less now than at any former period.”13
-How little the increased intensity and extension of labour through piece wages benefited the
-agricultural proletariat, the following passage borrowed from a work on the side of the landlords
-and farmers shows:
-“By far the greater part of agricultural operations is done by people who are hired
-for the day or on piece-work. Their weekly wages are about 12s., and although it
-may be assumed that a man earns on piece-work under the greater stimulus to
-labour, 1s. or perhaps 2s. more than on weekly wages, yet it is found, on
-calculating his total income, that his loss of employment, during the year,
-outweighs this gain...Further, it will generally be found that the wages of these
-men bear a certain proportion to the price of the necessary means of subsistence,
-so that a man with two children is able to bring up his family without recourse to
-parish relief.” 14
-Malthus at that time remarked with reference to the facts published by Parliament:
-“I confess that I see, with misgiving, the great extension of the practice of piece-
-wage. Really hard work during 12 or 14 hours of the day, or for any longer time,
-is too much for any human being.” 15
-In the workshops under the Factory Acts, piece wages become the general rule, because capital
-can there only increase the efficacy of the working day by intensifying labour.16
-With the changing productiveness of labour the same quantum of product represents a varying
-working-time. Therefore, piece-wage also varies, for it is the money expression of a determined
-working-time. In our example above, 24 pieces were produced in 12 hours, whilst the value of the
-391 Chapter 21
-product of the 12 hours was 6s., the daily value of the labour-power 3s., the price of the labour-
-hour 3d., and the wage for one piece ½d. In one piece half-an-hour’s labour was absorbed. If the
-same working day now supplies, in consequence of the doubled productiveness of labour, 48
-pieces instead of 24, and all other circumstances remain unchanged, then the piece-wage falls
-from 1 ½d. to 3/4d., as every piece now only represents 1/4, instead of ½ of a working-hour. 24
-by 1½d. = 3s., and in like manner 48 by 3/4d. = 3s. In other words, piece-wage is lowered in the
-same proportion as the number of the pieces produced in the same time rises,17 and, therefore, as
-the working time spent on the same piece falls. This change in piece-wage, so far purely nominal,
-leads to constant battles between capitalist and labour. Either because the capitalist uses it as a
-pretext for actually lowering the price of labour, or because increased productive power of labour
-is accompanied by an increased intensity of the same. Or because the labourer takes seriously the
-appearance of piece wages (viz., that his product is paid for, and not his labour-power) and
-therefore revolts against a lowering of wages, unaccompanied by a lowering in the selling price of
-the commodity.
-“The operatives...carefully watch the price of the raw material and the price of
-manufactured goods, and are thus enabled to form an accurate estimate of their
-master’s profits.”18
-The capitalist rightly knocks on the head such pretensions as gross errors as to the nature of
-wage-labour.19 He cries out against this usurping attempt to lay taxes on the advance of industry,
-and declares roundly that the productiveness of labour does not concern the labourer at all.20
-1 “The system of piece-work illustrates an epoch in the history of the working-man; it is halfway
-between the position of the mere day-labourer depending upon the will of the capitalist and the co-
-operative artisan, who in the not distant future promises to combine the artisan and the capitalist in his
-own person. Piece-workers are in fact their own masters, even whilst working upon the capital of the
-employer.” (John Watts: “Trade Societies and Strikes, Machinery and Co-operative Societies.”
-Manchester, 1865, pp. 52, 53.) I quote this little work because it is a very sink of all long-ago-rotten,
-apologetic commonplaces. This same Mr. Watts earlier traded in Owenism and published in 1842
-another pamphlet: “Facts and Fictions of Political Economists,” in which among other things he
-declares that “property is robbery.” That was long ago.
-2 T. J. Dunning: “Trades’ Unions and Strikes,” Lond., 1860, p. 22.
-3 How the existence, side by side and simultaneously, of these two forms of wage favors the masters’
-cheating: “A factory employs 400 people, the half of which work by the piece, and have a direct
-interest in working longer hours. The other 200 are paid by the day, work equally long with the others,
-and get no more money for their over-time.... The work of these 200 people for half an hour a day is
-equal to one person’s work for 50 hours, or 5/6’s of one person’s labour in a week, and is a positive
-gain to the employer.” (“Reports of Insp. of Fact., 31st Oct., 1860,” p. 9.) “Over-working to a very
-considerable extent still prevails; and, in most instances, with that security against detection and
-punishment which the law itself affords. I have in many former reports shown ... the injury to
-workpeople who are not employed on piece-work, but receive weekly wages.” (Leonard Horner in
-“Reports of Insp. of Fact.,” 30th April, 1859, pp. 8, 9.)
-4 “Wages can be measured in two ways: either by the duration of the labour, or by its product.”
-(“Abrégé élémentaire des principes de l’économie politique.” Paris, 1796, p. 32.) The author of this
-anonymous work: G. Garnier.
-5 “So much weight of cotton is delivered to him” (the spinner), “and he has to return by a certain time,
-in lieu of it, a given weight of twist or yarn, of a certain degree of fineness, and he is paid so much per
-392 Chapter 21
-pound for all that he so returns. If his work is defective in quality, the penalty falls on him, if less in
-quantity than the minimum fixed for a given time, he is dismissed and an abler operative procured.”
-(Ure, l.c., p. 317.)
-6 “It is when work passes through several hands, each of which is to take its share of profits, while
-only the last does the work, that the pay which reaches the workwoman is miserably disproportioned.”
-(“Child. Emp. Comm. II Report,” p. 1xx., n. 424.)
-7 Even Watts, the apologetic, remarks: “It would be a great improvement to the system of piece-work,
-if all the men employed on a job were partners in the contract, each according to his abilities, instead
-of one man being interested in over-working his fellows for his own benefit.” (l.c., p. 53.) On the
-vileness of this system, cf. “Child. Emp. Comm., Rep. III.,” p. 66, n. 22, p. 11, n. 124, p. xi, n. 13, 53,
-59, &c.
-8 This spontaneous result is often artificially helped along, e.g., in the Engineering Trade of London, a
-customary trick is “the selecting of a man who possesses superior physical strength and quickness, as
-the principal of several workmen, and paying him an additional rate, by the quarter or otherwise, with
-the understanding that he is to exert himself to the utmost to induce the others, who are only paid the
-ordinary wages, to keep up to him ... without any comment this will go far to explain many of the
-complaints of stinting the action, superior skill, and working-power, made by the employers against
-the men” (in Trades-Unions. Dunning, l.c., pp. 22, 23). As the author is himself a labourer and
-secretary of a Trades’ Union, this might be taken for exaggeration. But the reader may compare the
-“highly respectable” “Cyclopedia of Agriculture” of J. C. Morton, Art., the article “Labourer,” where
-this method is recommended to the farmers as an approved one.
-9 “All those who are paid by piece-work ... profit by the transgression of the legal limits of work. This
-observation as to the willingness to work over-time is especially applicable to the women employed as
-weavers and reelers.” (“Rept. of Insp. of Fact., 30th April, 1858,” p. 9.) “This system” (piece-work),
-“so advantageous to the employer ... tends directly to encourage the young potter greatly to over-work
-himself during the four or five years during which he is employed in the piece-work system, but at low
-wages.... This is ... another great cause to which the bad constitutions of the potters are to be
-attributed.” (“Child. Empl. Comm. 1. Rept.,” p. xiii.)
-10 “Where the work in any trade is paid for by the piece at so much per job ... wages may very
-materially differ in amount.... But in work by the day there is generally an uniform rate ... recognized
-by both employer and employed as the standard of wages for the general run of workmen in the
-trade.” (Dunning, l.c., p. 17.)
-11 “The work of the journeyman-artisans will be ruled by the day or by the piece. These master-
-artisans know about how much work a journeyman-artisan can do per day in each craft, and often pay
-them in proportion to the work which they do; the journey men, therefore, work as much as they can,
-in their own interest, without any further inspection.” (Cantillon, “Essai sur la Nature du Commerce
-en général,” Amst. Ed., 1756, pp. 185 and 202. The first edition appeared in 1755.) Cantillon, from
-whom Quesnay, Sir James Steuart & A. Smith have largely drawn, already here represents piece-wage
-as simply a modified form of time-wage. The French edition of Cantillon professes in its title to be a
-translation from the English, but the English edition: “The Analysis of Trade, Commerce, &c.,” by
-Philip Cantillon, late of the city of London, Merchant, is not only of later date (1759), but proves by
-its contents that it is a later and revised edition: e.g., in the French edition, Hume is not yet mentioned,
-whilst in the English, on the other hand, Petty hardly figures any longer. The English edition is
-theoretically less important, but it contains numerous details referring specifically to English
-commerce, bullion trade, &c., that are wanting in the French text. The words on the title-page of the
-English edition, according to which the work is “taken chiefly from the manuscript of a very ingenious
-gentleman, deceased, and adapted, &c.,” seem, therefore, a pure fiction, very customary at that time.
-393 Chapter 21
-12 “How often have we seen, in some workshops, many more workers recruited than the work actually
-called for? On many occasions, workers are recruited in anticipation of future work, which may never
-materialize. Because they are paid by piece wages, it is said that no risk is incurred, since any loss of
-time will be charged against the unemployed.” (H. Gregoir: “Les Typographes devant le Tribunal
-correctionnel de Bruxelles,” Brusseles, 1865, p. 9.)
-13 “Remarks on the Commercial Policy of Great Britain,” London, 1815.
-14 “A Defense of the Landowners and Farmers of Great Britain,” 1814, pp. 4, 5
-15 Malthus, “Inquiry into the Nature and Progress of Rent,” Lond., 1815.
-16 “Those who are paid by piece-work ... constitute probably four-fifths of the workers in the
-factories.” “Report of Insp. of Fact.,” 30th April, 1858.
-17 “The productive power of his spinning-machine is accurately measured, and the rate of pay for work
-done with it decreases with, though not as, the increase of its productive power.” (Ure, l.c., p. 317.)
-This last apologetic phrase Ure himself again cancels. The lengthening of the mule causes some
-increase of labour, he admits. The labour does therefore not diminish in the same ratio as its
-productivity increases. Further: “By this increase the productive power of the machine will be
-augmented one-fifth. When this event happens the spinner will not be paid at the same rate for work
-done as he was before, but as that rate will not be diminished in the ratio of one-fifth, the improvement
-will augment his money earnings for any given number of hours’ work,” but “the foregoing statement
-requires a certain modification.... The spinner has to pay something additional for juvenile aid out of
-his additional sixpence, accompanied by displacing a portion of adults” (l.c., p. 321), which has in no
-way a tendency to raise wages.
-18 H. Fawcett: “The Economic Position of the British labourer.” Cambridge and London, 1865, p. 178.
-19 In the “London Standard” of October 26, 1861, there is a report of proceedings of the firm of John
-Bright & Co., before the Rochdale magistrates “to prosecute for intimidation the agents of the Carpet
-Weavers Trades’ Union. Bright’s partners had introduced new machinery which would turn out 240
-yards of carpet in the time and with the labour (!) previously required to produce 160 yards. The
-workmen had no claim whatever to share in the profits made by the investment of their employer’s
-capital in mechanical improvements. Accordingly, Messrs. Bright proposed to lower the rate of pay
-from 1½d. per yard to 1d., leaving the earnings of the men exactly the same as before for the same
-labour. But there was a nominal reduction, of which the operatives, it is asserted, had not fair warning
-beforehand.”
-20 “Trades’ Unions, in their desire to maintain wages, endeavor to share in the benefits of
-improved machinery.” (Quelle horreur!) “... the demanding higher wages, because labour
-is abbreviated, is in other words the endeavor to establish a duty on mechanical
-improvements.” (“On Combination of Trades,” new ed., London, 1834, p. 42.)
-Chapter 22: National Differences of Wages
-In the 17th chapter we were occupied with the manifold combinations which may bring about a
-change in magnitude of the value of labour-power – this magnitude being considered either
-absolutely or relatively, i.e., as compared with surplus-value; whilst on the other hand, the
-quantum of the means of subsistence in which the price of labour is realized might again undergo
-fluctuations independent of, or different from, the changes of this price.1 As has been already
-said, the simple translation of the value, or respectively of the price, of labour-power into the
-exoteric form of wages transforms all these laws into laws of the fluctuations of wages. That
-which appears in these fluctuations of wages within a single country as a series of varying
-combinations, may appear in different countries as contemporaneous difference of national
-wages. In the comparison of the wages in different nations, we must therefore take into account
-all the factors that determine changes in the amount of the value of labour-power; the price and
-the extent of the prime necessaries of life as naturally and historically developed, the cost of
-training the labourers, the part played by the labour of women and children, the productiveness of
-labour, its extensive and intensive magnitude. Even the most superficial comparison requires the
-reduction first of the average day-wage for the same trades, in different countries, to a uniform
-working day. After this reduction to the same terms of the day-wages, time-wage must again be
-translated into piece-wage, as the latter only can be a measure both of the productivity and the
-intensity of labour.
-In every country there is a certain average intensity of labour below which the labour for the
-production of a commodity requires more than the socially necessary time, and therefore does not
-reckon as labour of normal quality. Only a degree of intensity above the national average affects,
-in a given country, the measure of value by the mere duration of the working-time. This is not the
-case on the universal market, whose integral parts are the individual countries. The average
-intensity of labour changes from country to country; here it is greater, there less. These national
-averages form a scale, whose unit of measure is the average unit of universal labour. The more
-intense national labour, therefore, as compared with the less intense, produces in the same time
-more value, which expresses itself in more money.
-But the law of value in its international application is yet more modified by the fact that on the
-world-market the more productive national labour reckons also as the more intense, so long as the
-more productive nation is not compelled by competition to lower the selling price of its
-commodities to the level of their value.
-In proportion as capitalist production is developed in a country, in the same proportion do the
-national intensity and productivity of labour there rise above the international level.2 The
-different quantities of commodities of the same kind, produced in different countries in the same
-working-time, have, therefore, unequal international values, which are expressed in different
-prices, i.e., in sums of money varying according to international values. The relative value of
-money will, therefore, be less in the nation with more developed capitalist mode of production
-than in the nation with less developed. It follows, then, that the nominal wages, the equivalent of
-labour-power expressed in money, will also be higher in the first nation than in the second; which
-does not at all prove that this holds also for the real wages, i.e., for the means of subsistence
-placed at the disposal of the labourer.
-But even apart from these relative differences of the value of money in different countries, it will
-be found, frequently, that the daily or weekly, &tc., wage in the first nation is higher than in the
-395 Chapter 22
-second, whilst the relative price of labour, i.e., the price of labour as compared both with surplus-
-value and with the value of the product, stands higher in the second than in the first.3
-J. W. Cowell, member of the Factory Commission of 1833, after careful investigation of the
-spinning trade, came to the conclusion that
-“in England wages are virtually lower to the capitalist, though higher to the
-operative than on the Continent of Europe.”4
-The English Factory Inspector, Alexander Redgrave, in his report of Oct. 31st, 1866, proves by
-comparative statistics with continental states, that in spite of lower wages and much longer
-working-time, continental labour is, in proportion to the product, dearer than English. An English
-manager of a cotton factory in Oldenburg declares that the working time there lasted from 5:30
-a.m. to 8 p.m., Saturdays included, and that the workpeople there, when under English
-overlookers, did not supply during this time quite so much product as the English in 10 hours, but
-under German overlookers much less. Wages are much lower than in England, in many cases
-50%, but the number of hands in proportion to the machinery was much greater, in certain
-departments in the proportion of 5:3.
-Mr. Redgrave gives very full details as to the Russian cotton factories. The data were given him
-by an English manager until recently employed there. On this Russian soil, so fruitful of all
-infamies, the old horrors of the early days of English factories are in full swing. The managers
-are, of course, English, as the native Russian capitalist is of no use in factory business. Despite all
-over-work, continued day and night, despite the most shameful under-payment of the
-workpeople, Russian manufacture manages to vegetate only by prohibition of foreign
-competition.
-I give, in conclusion, a comparative table of Mr. Redgrave’s, on the average number of spindles
-per factory and per spinner in the different countries of Europe. He himself remarks that he had
-collected these figures a few years ago, and that since that time the size of the factories and the
-number of spindles per labourer in England has increased. He supposes, however, an
-approximately equal progress in the continental countries mentioned, so that the numbers given
-would still have their value for purposes of comparison.
-AVERAGE NUMBER OF SPINDLES PER FACTORY
-England, average of spindles per factory 12,600
-France, average of spindles per factory 1,500
-Prussia, average of spindles per factory 1,500
-Belgium, average of spindles per factory 4,000
-Saxony, average of spindles per factory 4,500
-Austria, average of spindles per factory 7,000
-Switzerland, average of spindles per factory 8,000
-AVERAGE NUMBER OF PERSONS EMPLOYED TO SPINDLES
-France one person to 14 spindles
-Russia one person to 28 spindles
-Prussia one person to 37 spindles
-Bavaria one person to 46 spindles
-Austria one person to 49 spindles
-Belgium one person to 50 spindles
-Saxony one person to 50 spindles
-396 Chapter 22
-Switzerland one person to 55 spindles
-Smaller States of Germany one person to 55 spindles
-Great Britain one person to 74 spindles
-“This comparison,” says Mr. Redgrave, “is yet more unfavorable to Great Britain, inasmuch as
-there is so large a number of factories in which weaving by power is carried on in conjunction
-with spinning” (whilst in the table the weavers are not deducted), “and the factories abroad are
-chiefly spinning factories; if it were possible to compare like with like, strictly, I could find many
-cotton spinning factories in my district in which mules containing 2,200 spindles are minded by
-one man (the minder) and two assistants only, turning off daily 220 lbs. of yarn, measuring 400
-miles in length.” 5
-It is well known that in Eastern Europe, as well as in Asia, English companies have undertaken
-the construction of railways, and have, in making them, employed side by side with the native
-labourers, a certain number of English working-men. Compelled by practical necessity, they thus
-have had to take into account the national difference in the intensity of labour, but this has
-brought them no loss. Their experience shows that even if the height of wages corresponds more
-or less with the average intensity of labour, the relative price of labour varies generally in the
-inverse direction.
-In an “Essay on the Rate of Wages,”6 one of his first economic writings, H. Carey tries to prove
-that the wages of the different nations are directly proportional to the degree of productiveness of
-the national working days, in order to draw from this international relation the conclusion that
-wages everywhere rise and fall in proportion to the productiveness of labour. The whole of our
-analysis of the production of surplus-value shows the absurdity of this conclusion, even if Carey
-himself had proved his premises instead of, after his usual uncritical and superficial fashion,
-shuffling to and fro a confused mass of statistical materials. The best of it is that he does not
-assert that things actually are as they ought to be according to his theory. For State intervention
-has falsified the natural economic relations. The different national wages must be reckoned,
-therefore, as if that part of each that goes to the State in the form of taxes, came to the labourer
-himself. Ought not Mr. Carey to consider further whether those “State expenses” are not the
-“natural” fruits of capitalistic development? The reasoning is quite worthy of the man who first
-declared the relations of capitalist production to be eternal laws of nature and reason, whose free,
-harmonious working is only disturbed by the intervention of the State, in order afterwards to
-discover that the diabolical influence of England on the world market (an influence which, it
-appears, does not spring from the natural laws of capitalist production) necessitates State
-intervention, i.e., the protection of those laws of nature and reason by the State, alias the System
-of Protection. He discovered further that the theorems of Ricardo and others, in which existing
-social antagonisms and contradictions are formulated, are not the ideal product of the real
-economic movement, but on the contrary, that the real antagonisms of capitalist production in
-England and elsewhere are the result of the theories of Ricardo and others! Finally he discovered
-that it is, in the last resort, commerce that destroys the inborn beauties and harmonies of the
-capitalist mode of production. A step further and he will, perhaps, discover that the one evil in
-capitalist production is capital itself. Only a man with such atrocious want of the critical faculty
-and such spurious erudition deserved, in spite of his Protectionist heresy, to become the secret
-source of the harmonious wisdom of a Bastiat, and of all the other Free-trade optimists of today.
-397 Chapter 22
-1 “It is not accurate to say that wages” (he deals here with their money expression) “are increased,
-because they purchase more of a cheaper article.” (David Buchanan in his edition of Adam Smith’s
-“Wealth of Nations,” 1814, Vol. 1, p. 417, note.)
-2 We shall inquire, in another place, what circumstances in relation to productivity may modify this
-law for individual branches of industry.
-3 James Anderson remarks in his polemic against Adam Smith: “It deserves, likewise, to be remarked,
-that although the apparent price of Labour is usually lower in poor countries, where the produce of the
-soil, and grain in general, is cheap; yet it is in fact for the most part really higher than in other
-countries. For it is not the wages that is given to the labourer per day that constitutes the real price of
-labour, although it is its apparent price. The real price is that which a certain quantity of work
-performed actually costs the employer; and considered in this light, labour is in almost all cases
-cheaper in rich countries than in those that are poorer, although the price of grain and other provisions
-is usually much lower in the last than in the first.... Labour estimated by the day is much lower in
-Scotland than in England.... Labour by the piece is generally cheaper in England.” (James Anderson,
-“Observations on the Means of Exciting a Spirit of National Industry,” &tc., Edin. 1777, pp. 350,
-351.) On the contrary, lowness of wages produces, in its turn, dearness of labour. “Labour being
-dearer in Ireland than it is in England ... because the wages are so much lower.” (N. 2079 in “Royal
-Commission on Railways, Minutes,” 1867.)
-4 (Ure, op. cit., p. 314.)
-5 (“Reports of Insp. of Fact.,” 31st Oct., 1866, pp. 31-37, passim.)
-6 “Essay on the Rate of Wages, with an Examination of the Causes of the Differences in the Condition
-of the Labouring Population throughout the World,” Philadelphia, 1835.
-Part 7: The Accumulation of Capital
-The conversion of a sum of money into means of production and labour-power, is the first step
-taken by the quantum of value that is going to function as capital. This conversion takes place in
-the market, within the sphere of circulation. The second step, the process of production, is
-complete so soon as the means of production have been converted into commodities whose value
-exceeds that of their component parts, and, therefore, contains the capital originally advanced,
-plus a surplus-value. These commodities must then be thrown into circulation. They must be sold,
-their value realised in money, this money afresh converted into capital, and so over and over
-again. This circular movement, in which the same phases are continually gone through in
-succession, forms the circulation of capital.
-The first condition of accumulation is that the capitalist must have contrived to sell his
-commodities, and to reconvert into capital the greater part of the money so received. In the
-following pages we shall assume that capital circulates in its normal way. The detailed analysis of
-the process will be found in Book II.
-The capitalist who produces surplus-value – i.e., who extracts unpaid labour directly from the
-labourers, and fixes it in commodities, is, indeed, the first appropriator, but by no means the
-ultimate owner, of this surplus-value. He has to share it with capitalists, with landowners, &c.,
-who fulfil other functions in the complex of social production. Surplus-value, therefore, splits up
-into various parts. Its fragments fall to various categories of persons, and take various forms,
-independent the one of the other, such as profit, interest, merchants’ profit, rent, &c. It is only in
-Book III. that we can take in hand these modified forms of surplus-value.
-On the one hand, then, we assume that the capitalist sells at their value the commodities he has
-produced, without concerning ourselves either about the new forms that capital assumes while in
-the sphere of circulation, or about the concrete conditions of reproduction hidden under these
-forms. On the other hand, we treat the capitalist producer as owner of the entire surplus-value, or,
-better perhaps, as the representative of all the sharers with him in the booty. We, therefore, first of
-all consider accumulation from an abstract point of view – i.e., as a mere phase in the actual
-process of production.
-So far as accumulation takes place, the capitalist must have succeeded in selling his commodities,
-and in reconverting the sale-money into capital. Moreover, the breaking-up of surplus-value into
-fragments neither alters its nature nor the conditions under which it becomes an element of
-accumulation. Whatever be the proportion of surplus-value which the industrial capitalist retains
-for himself, or yields up to others, he is the one who, in the first instance, appropriates it. We,
-therefore, assume no more than what actually takes place. On the other hand, the simple
-fundamental form of the process of accumulation is obscured by the incident of the circulation
-which brings it about, and by the splitting up of surplus-value. An exact analysis of the process,
-therefore, demands that we should, for a time, disregard all phenomena that hide the play of its
-inner mechanism.
-399 Chapter 23
-Chapter 23: Simple Reproduction
-Whatever the form of the process of production in a society, it must be a continuous process,
-must continue to go periodically through the same phases. A society can no more cease to
-produce than it can cease to consume. When viewed, therefore, as a connected whole, and as
-flowing on with incessant renewal, every social process of production is, at the same time, a
-process of reproduction.
-The conditions of production are also those of reproduction. No society can go on producing, in
-other words, no society can reproduce, unless it constantly reconverts a part of its products into
-means of production, or elements of fresh products. All other circumstances remaining the same,
-the only mode by which it can reproduce its wealth, and maintain it at one level, is by replacing
-the means of production – i.e., the instruments of labour, the raw material, and the auxiliary
-substances consumed in the course of the year – by an equal quantity of the same kind of articles;
-these must be separated from the mass of the yearly products, and thrown afresh into the process
-of production. Hence, a definite portion of each year’s product belongs to the domain of
-production. Destined for productive consumption from the very first, this portion exists, for the
-most part, in the shape of articles totally unfitted for individual consumption.
-If production be capitalistic in form, so, too, will be reproduction. Just as in the former the labour
-process figures but as a means towards the self-expansion of capital, so in the latter it figures but
-as a means of reproducing as capital – i.e., as self-expanding value – the value advanced. It is
-only because his money constantly functions as capital that the economic guise of a capitalist
-attaches to a man. If, for instance, a sum of £100 has this year been converted into capital, and
-produced a surplus-value of £20, it must continue during next year, and subsequent years, to
-repeat the same operation. As a periodic increment of the capital advanced, or periodic fruit of
-capital in process, surplus-value acquires the form of a revenue flowing out of capital.1
-If this revenue serve the capitalist only as a fund to provide for his consumption, and be spent as
-periodically as it is gained, then, caeteris paribus, simple reproduction will take place. And
-although this reproduction is a mere repetition of the process of production on the old scale, yet
-this mere repetition, or continuity, gives a new character to the process, or, rather, causes the
-disappearance of some apparent characteristics which it possessed as an isolated discontinuous
-process.
-The purchase of labour-power for a fixed period is the prelude to the process of production; and
-this prelude is constantly repeated when the stipulated term comes to an end, when a definite
-period of production, such as a week or a month, has elapsed. But the labourer is not paid until
-after he has expended his labour-power, and realised in commodities not only its value, but
-surplus-value. He has, therefore, produced not only surplus-value, which we for the present
-regard as a fund to meet the private consumption of the capitalist, but he has also produced,
-before it flows back to him in the shape of wages, the fund out of which he himself is paid, the
-variable capital; and his employment lasts only so long as he continues to reproduce this fund.
-Hence, that formula of the economists, referred to in Chapter XVIII, which represents wages as a
-share in the product itself.2 What flows back to the labourer in the shape of wages is a portion of
-the product that is continuously reproduced by him. The capitalist, it is true, pays him in money,
-but this money is merely the transmuted form of the product of his labour. While he is converting
-a portion of the means of production into products, a portion of his former product is being turned
-into money. It is his labour of last week, or of last year, that pays for his labour-power this week
-400 Chapter 23
-or this year. The illusion begotten by the intervention of money vanishes immediately, if, instead
-of taking a single capitalist and a single labourer, we take the class of capitalists and the class of
-labourers as a whole. The capitalist class is constantly giving to the labouring class order-notes, in
-the form of money, on a portion of the commodities produced by the latter and appropriated by
-the former. The labourers give these order-notes back just as constantly to the capitalist class, and
-in this way get their share of their own product. The transaction is veiled by the commodity form
-of the product and the money form of the commodity.
-Variable capital is therefore only a particular historical form of appearance of the fund for
-providing the necessaries of life, or the labour-fund which the labourer requires for the
-maintenance of himself and family, and which, whatever be the system of social production, he
-must himself produce and reproduce. If the labour-fund constantly flows to him in the form of
-money that pays for his labour, it is because the product he has created moves constantly away
-from him in the form of capital. But all this does not alter the fact, that it is the labourer’s own
-labour, realised in a product, which is advanced to him by the capitalist.3 Let us take a peasant
-liable to do compulsory service for his lord. He works on his own land, with his own means of
-production, for, say, 3 days a week. The 3 other days he does forced work on the lord’s domain.
-He constantly reproduces his own labour-fund, which never, in his case, takes the form of a
-money payment for his labour, advanced by another person. But in return, his unpaid forced
-labour for the lord, on its side, never acquires the character of voluntary paid labour. If one fine
-morning the lord appropriates to himself the land, the cattle, the seed, in a word, the, means of
-production of this peasant, the latter will thenceforth be obliged to sell his labour-power to the
-lord. He will, ceteris paribus, labour 6 days a week as before, 3 for himself, 3 for his lord, who
-thenceforth becomes a wages-paying capitalist. As before, he will use up the means of production
-as means of production, and transfer their value to the product. As before, a definite portion of the
-product will be devoted to reproduction. But from the moment that the forced labour is changed
-into wage labour, from that moment the labour-fund, which the peasant himself continues as
-before to produce and reproduce, takes the form of a capital advanced in the form of wages by the
-lord. The bourgeois economist whose narrow mind is unable to separate the form of appearance
-from the thing that appears, shuts his eyes to the fact, that it is but here and there on the face of
-the earth, that even nowadays the labour fund crops up in the form of capital.4
-Variable capital, it is true, only then loses its character of a value advanced out of the capitalist’s
-funds, 5 when we view the process of capitalist production in the flow of its constant renewal. But
-that process must have had a beginning of some kind. From our present standpoint it therefore
-seems likely that the capitalist, once upon a time, became possessed of money, by some
-accumulation that took place independently of the unpaid labour of others, and that this was,
-therefore, how he was enabled to frequent the market as a buyer of labour-power. However this
-may be, the mere continuity of the process, the simple reproduction, brings about some other
-wonderful changes, which affect not only the variable, but the total capital.
-If a capital of £1,000 beget yearly a surplus-value of £200, and if this surplus-value be consumed
-every year, it is clear that at the end of 5 years the surplus-value consumed will amount to 5 ×
-£200 or the £1,000 originally advanced. If only a part, say one half, were consumed, the same
-result would follow at the end of 10 years, since 10 × £100= £1,000. General Rule: The value of
-the capital advanced divided by the surplus-value annually consumed, gives the number of years,
-or reproduction periods, at the expiration of which the capital originally advanced has been
-consumed by the capitalist and has disappeared. The capitalist thinks, that he is consuming the
-produce of the unpaid labour of others, i.e., the surplus-value, and is keeping intact his original
-capital; but what he thinks cannot alter facts. After the lapse of a certain number of years, the
-401 Chapter 23
-capital value he then possesses is equal to the sum total of the surplus-value appropriated by him
-during those years, and the total value he has consumed is equal to that of his original capital. It is
-true, he has in hand a capital whose amount has not changed, and of which a part, viz., the
-buildings, machinery, &c., were already there when the work of his business began. But what we
-have to do with here, is not the material elements, but the value, of that capital. When a person
-gets through all his property, by taking upon himself debts equal to the value of that property, it is
-clear that his property represents nothing but the sum total of his debts. And so it is with the
-capitalist; when he has consumed the equivalent of his original capital, the value of his present
-capital represents nothing but the total amount of the surplus-value appropriated by him without
-payment. Not a single atom of the value of his old capital continues to exist.
-Apart then from all accumulation, the mere continuity of the process of production, in other
-words simple reproduction, sooner or later, and of necessity, converts every capital into
-accumulated capital, or capitalised surplus-value. Even if that capital was originally acquired by
-the personal labour of its employer, it sooner or later becomes value appropriated without an
-equivalent, the unpaid labour of others materialised either in money or in some other object. We
-saw in Chapt. IV.-VI. that in order to convert money into capital something more is required than
-the production and circulation of commodities. We saw that on the one side the possessor of
-value or money, on the other, the possessor of the value-creating substance; on the one side, the
-possessor of the means of production and subsistence, on the other, the possessor of nothing but
-labour-power, must confront one another as buyer and seller. The separation of labour from its
-product, of subjective labour-power from the objective conditions of labour, was therefore the
-real foundation in fact, and the starting-point of capitalist production.
-But that which at first was but a starting-point, becomes, by the mere continuity of the process, by
-simple reproduction, the peculiar result, constantly renewed and perpetuated, of capitalist
-production. On the one hand, the process of production incessantly converts material wealth into
-capital, into means of creating more wealth and means of enjoyment for the capitalist. On the
-other hand, the labourer, on quitting the process, is what he was on entering it, a source of wealth,
-but devoid of all means of making that wealth his own. Since, before entering on the process, his
-own labour has already been alienated from himself by the sale of his labour-power, has been
-appropriated by the capitalist and incorporated with capital, it must, during the process, be
-realised in a product that does not belong to him. Since the process of production is also the
-process by which the capitalist consumes labour-power, the product of the labourer is incessantly
-converted, not only into commodities, but into capital, into value that sucks up the value-creating
-power, into means of subsistence that buy the person of the labourer, into means of production
-that command the producers.6 The labourer therefore constantly produces material, objective
-wealth, but in the form of capital, of an alien power that dominates and exploits him; and the
-capitalist as constantly produces labour-power, but in the form of a subjective source of wealth,
-separated from the objects in and by which it can alone be realised; in short he produces the
-labourer, but as a wage labourer.7 This incessant reproduction, this perpetuation of the labourer, is
-the sine quâ non of capitalist production.
-The labourer consumes in a two-fold way. While producing he consumes by his labour the means
-of production, and converts them into products with a higher value than that of the capital
-advanced. This is his productive consumption. It is at the same time consumption of his labour-
-power by the capitalist who bought it. On the other hand, the labourer turns the money paid to
-him for his labour-power, into means of subsistence: this is his individual consumption. The
-labourer’s productive consumption, and his individual consumption, are therefore totally distinct.
-In the former, he acts as the motive power of capital, and belongs to the capitalist. In the latter, he
-402 Chapter 23
-belongs to himself, and performs his necessary vital functions outside the process of production.
-The result of the one is, that the capitalist lives; of the other, that the labourer lives.
-When treating of the working day, we saw that the labourer is often compelled to make his
-individual consumption a mere incident of production. In such a case, he supplies himself with
-necessaries in order to maintain his labour-power, just as coal and water are supplied to the
-steam-engine and oil to the wheel. His means of consumption, in that case, are the mere means of
-consumption required by a means of production; his individual consumption is directly
-productive consumption. This, however, appears to be an abuse not essentially appertaining to
-capitalist production.8
-The matter takes quite another aspect, when we contemplate, not the single capitalist, and the
-single labourer, but the capitalist class and the labouring class, not an isolated process of
-production, but capitalist production in full swing, and on its actual social scale. By converting
-part of his capital into labour-power, the capitalist augments the value of his entire capital. He
-kills two birds with one stone. He profits, not only by what he receives from, but by what he gives
-to, the labourer. The capital given in exchange for labour-power is converted into necessaries, by
-the consumption of which the muscles, nerves, bones, and brains of existing labourers are
-reproduced, and new labourers are begotten. Within the limits of what is strictly necessary, the
-individual consumption of the working class is, therefore, the reconversion of the means of
-subsistence given by capital in exchange for labour-power, into fresh labour-power at the disposal
-of capital for exploitation. It is the production and reproduction of that means of production so
-indispensable to the capitalist: the labourer himself. The individual consumption of the labourer,
-whether it proceed within the workshop or outside it, whether it be part of the process of
-production or not, forms therefore a factor of the production and reproduction of capital; just as
-cleaning machinery does, whether it be done while the machinery is working or while it is
-standing. The fact that the labourer consumes his means of subsistence for his own purposes, and
-not to please the capitalist, has no bearing on the matter. The consumption of food by a beast of
-burden is none the less a necessary factor in the process of production, because the beast enjoys
-what it eats. The maintenance and reproduction of the working class is, and must ever be, a
-necessary condition to the reproduction of capital. But the capitalist may safely leave its
-fulfilment to the labourer’s instincts of self-preservation and of propagation. All the capitalist
-cares for, is to reduce the labourer’s individual consumption as far as possible to what is strictly
-necessary, and he is far away from imitating those brutal South Americans, who force their
-labourers to take the more substantial, rather than the less substantial, kind of food.9
-Hence both the capitalist and his ideological representative, the political economist, consider that
-part alone of the labourer’s individual consumption to be productive, which is requisite for the
-perpetuation of the class, and which therefore must take place in order that the capitalist may
-have labour-power to consume; what the labourer consumes for his own pleasure beyond that
-part, is unproductive consumption.10 If the accumulation of capital were to cause a rise of wages
-and an increase in the labourer’s consumption, unaccompanied by increase in the consumption of
-labour-power by capital, the additional capital would be consumed unproductively.11 In reality,
-the individual consumption of the labourer is unproductive as regards himself, for it reproduces
-nothing but the needy individual; it is productive to the capitalist and to the State, since it is the
-production of the power that creates their wealth.12
-From a social point of view, therefore, the working class, even when not directly engaged in the
-labour process, is just as much an appendage of capital as the ordinary instruments of labour.
-Even its individual consumption is, within certain limits, a mere factor in the process of
-production. That process, however, takes good care to prevent these self-conscious instruments
-403 Chapter 23
-from leaving it in the lurch, for it removes their product, as fast as it is made, from their pole to
-the opposite pole of capital. Individual consumption provides, on the one hand, the means for
-their maintenance and reproduction: on the other hand, it secures by the annihilation of the
-necessaries of life, the continued re-appearance of the workman in the labour-market. The Roman
-slave was held by fetters: the wage labourer is bound to his owner by invisible threads. The
-appearance of independence is kept up by means of a constant change of employers, and by the
-fictio juris of a contract.
-In former times, capital resorted to legislation, whenever necessary, to enforce its proprietary
-rights over the free labourer. For instance, down to 1815, the emigration of mechanics employed
-in machine making was, in England, forbidden, under grievous pains and penalties.
-The reproduction of the working class carries with it the accumulation of skill, that is handed
-down from one generation to another.13 To what extent the capitalist reckons the existence of
-such a skilled class among the factors of production that belong to him by right, and to what
-extent he actually regards it as the reality of his variable capital, is seen so soon as a crisis
-threatens him with its loss. In consequence of the civil war in the United States and of the
-accompanying cotton famine, the majority of the cotton operatives in Lancashire were, as is well
-known, thrown out of work. Both from the working class itself, and from other ranks of society,
-there arose a cry for State aid, or for voluntary national subscriptions, in order to enable the
-“superfluous” hands to emigrate to the colonies or to the United States. Thereupon, The Times
-published on the 24th March, 1863, a letter from Edmund Potter, a former president of the
-Manchester Chamber of Commerce. This letter was rightly called in the House of Commons, the
-manufacturers’ manifesto.14 We cull here a few characteristic passages, in which the proprietary
-rights of capital over labour-power are unblushingly asserted.
-“He” (the man out of work) “may be told the supply of cotton-workers is too large
-... and ... must ... in fact be reduced by a third, perhaps, and that then there will be
-a healthy demand for the remaining two-thirds.... Public opinion... urges
-emigration.... The master cannot willingly see his labour supply being removed;
-he may think, and perhaps justly, that it is both wrong and unsound.... But if the
-public funds are to be devoted to assist emigration, he bas a right to be heard, and
-perhaps to protest.”
-Mr. Potter then shows how useful the cotton trade is, how the “trade has undoubtedly drawn the
-surplus-population from Ireland and from the agricultural districts,” how immense is its extent,
-how in the year 1860 it yielded 5/13 ths of the total English exports, how, after a few years, it will
-again expand by the extension of the market, particularly of the Indian market, and by calling
-forth a plentiful supply of cotton at 6d. per lb. He then continues:
-“Some time ...,one, two, or three years, it may be, will produce the quantity.... The
-question I would put then is this – Is the trade worth retaining? Is it worth while to
-keep the machinery (he means the living labour machines) in order, and is it not
-the greatest folly to think of parting with that? I think it is. I allow that the workers
-are not a property, not the property of Lancashire and the masters; but they are the
-strength of both; they are the mental and trained power which cannot be. replaced
-for a generation; the mere machinery which they work might much of it be
-beneficially replaced, nay improved, in a twelvemonth 15 Encourage or allow (!)
-the working-power to emigrate, and what of the capitalist?... Take away the cream
-of the workers, and fixed capital will depreciate in a great degree, and the floating
-will not subject itself to a struggle with the short supply of inferior labour.... We
-are told the workers wish it” (emigration). “Very natural it is that they should do
-404 Chapter 23
-so.... Reduce, compress the cotton trade by taking away its working power and
-reducing their wages expenditure, say one-fifth, or five millions, and what then
-would happen to the class above, the small shopkeepers; and what of the rents, the
-cottage rents.... Trace out the effects upwards to the small farmer, the better
-householder, and ... the landowner, and say if there could be any suggestion more
-suicidal to all classes of the country than by enfeebling a nation by exporting the
-best of its manufacturing population, and destroying the value of some of its most
-productive capital and enrichment .... I advise a loan (of five or six millions
-sterling), ... extending it may be over two or three years, administered by special
-commissioners added to the Boards of Guardians in the cotton districts, under
-special legislative regulations, enforcing some occupation or labour, as a means of
-keeping up at least the moral standard of the recipients of the loan... can anything
-be worse for landowners or masters than parting with the best of the workers, and
-demoralising and disappointing the rest by an extended depletive emigration, a
-depletion of capital and value in an entire province?”
-Potter, the chosen mouthpiece of the manufacturers, distinguishes two sorts of “machinery,” each
-of which belongs to the capitalist, and of which one stands in his factory, the other at night-time
-and on Sundays is housed outside the factory, in cottages. The one is inanimate, the other living.
-The inanimate machinery not only wears out and depreciates from day to day, but a great part of
-it becomes so quickly superannuated, by constant technical progress, that it can be replaced with
-advantage by new machinery after a few months. The living machinery, on the contrary gets
-better the longer it lasts, and in proportion as the skill, handed from one generation to another,
-accumulates. The Times answered the cotton lord as follows:
-“Mr. Edmund Potter is so impressed with the exceptional and supreme importance
-of the cotton masters that, in order to preserve this class and perpetuate their
-profession, he would keep half a million of the labouring class confined in a great
-moral workhouse against their will. ‘Is the trade worth retaining?’ asks Mr. Potter.
-‘Certainly by all honest means it is,’ we answer. ‘Is it worth while keeping the
-machinery in order?’ again asks Mr. Potter. Here we hesitate. By the ‘machinery’
-Mr. Potter means the human machinery, for he goes on to protest that he does not
-mean to use them as an absolute property. We must confess that we do not think it
-‘worth while,’ or even possible, to keep the human machinery in order – that is to
-shut it up and keep it oiled till it is wanted. Human machinery will rust under
-inaction, oil and rub it as you may. Moreover, the human machinery will, as we
-have just seen, get the steam up of its own accord, and burst or run amuck in our
-great towns. It might, as Mr. Potter says, require some time to reproduce the
-workers, but, having machinists and capitalists at hand, we could always find
-thrifty, hard, industrious men wherewith to improvise more master manufacturers
-than we can ever want. Mr. Potter talks of the trade reviving ‘in one, two, or three
-years,’ and he asks us not ‘to encourage or allow (!) the working power to
-emigrate.’16 He says that it is very natural the workers should wish to emigrate;
-but he thinks that in spite of their desire, the nation ought to keep this half million
-of workers with their 700,000 dependents, shut up in the cotton districts; and as a
-necessary consequence, he must of course think that the nation ought to keep
-down their discontent by force, and sustain them by alms – and upon the chance
-that the cotton masters may some day want them.... The time is come when the
-great public opinion of these islands must operate to save this ‘working power’
-405 Chapter 23
-from those who would deal with it as they would deal with iron, and coal, and
-cotton.”
-The Times’ article was only a jeu d’esprit. The “great public opinion” was, in fact, of Mr. Potter’s
-opinion, that the factory operatives are part of the movable fittings of a factory. Their emigration
-was prevented. They were locked up in that “moral workhouse,” the cotton districts, and they
-form, as before, “the strength” of the cotton manufacturers of Lancashire.
-Capitalist production, therefore, of itself reproduces the separation between labour-power and the
-means of labour. It thereby reproduces and perpetuates the condition for exploiting the labourer.
-It incessantly forces him to sell his labour-power in order to live, and enables the capitalist to
-purchase labour-power in order that he may enrich himself.17 It is no longer a mere accident, that
-capitalist and labourer confront each other in the market as buyer and seller. It is the process itself
-that incessantly hurls back the labourer on to the market as a vendor of his labour-power, and that
-incessantly converts his own product into a means by which another man can purchase him. In
-reality, the labourer belongs to capital before he has sold himself to capital. His economic
-bondage18 is both brought about and concealed by the periodic sale of himself, by his change of
-masters, and by the oscillations in the market-price of labour-power.19
-Capitalist production, therefore, under its aspect of a continuous connected process, of a process
-of reproduction, produces not only commodities, not only surplus-value, but it also produces and
-reproduces the capitalist relation; on the one side the capitalist, on the other the wage labourer.20
-1 “Mais ces riches, qui consomment les produits du travail des autres, ne peuvent les obtenir que par
-des échanges [purchases of commodities]. S’ils donnent cependant leur richesse acquise et accumulée
-en retour contre ces produits nouveaux qui sont l’objet de leur fantaisie, ils semblent exposés à épuiser
-bientôt leur fonds de réserve; ils ne travaillent point, avons-nous dit, et ils ne peuvent même travailler;
-on croirait donc que chaque jour doit voir diminuer leurs vieilles richesses, et que lorsqu’il ne leur en
-restera plus, rien ne sera offert en échange aux ouvriers qui travaillent exclusivement pour eux.... Mais
-dans l’ordre social, la richesse a acquis la propriété de se reproduire par le travail d’autrui, et sans que
-son propriétaire y concoure. La richesse, comme le travail, et par le travail, donne un fruit annuel qui
-peut être détruit chaque année sans que le riche en devienne plus pauvre. Ce fruit est le revenu qui naît
-du capital.” [The rich, who consume the labour of others, can only obtain them by making exchanges
-... By giving away their acquired and accumulated wealth in exchange for the new products which are
-the object of their capricious wishes, they seem to be exposed to an early exhaustion of their reserve
-fund; we have already said that they do not work and are unable to work; therefore it could be
-assumed with full justification that their former wealth would be diminishing with every day and that,
-finally, a day would come when they would have nothing, and they would have nothing to offer to the
-workers, who work exclusively for them. ... But, in the social order, wealth has acquired the power of
-reproducing itself through the labour of others, without the help of its owners. Wealth, like labour, and
-by means of labour, bears fruit every year, but this fruit can be destroyed every year without making
-the rich man any poorer thereby. This fruit is the revenue which arises our of capital.] (Sismondi:
-“Nouv. Princ. d’Econ. Pol.” Paris, 1819, t. I, pp. 81-82.)
-2 “Wages as well as profits are to be considered, each of them, as really a portion of the finished
-product.” (Ramsay, l. c., p. 142.) “The share of the product which comes to the labourer in the form of
-wages.” (J. Mill, “Eléments, &c.” Translated by Parissot. Paris, 1823, p. 34.)
-3 “When capital is employed in advancing to the workman his wages, it adds nothing to the funds for
-the maintenance of labour.” (Cazenove in note to his edition of Malthus’ “Definitions in Pol. Econ.”
-London, 1853, p. 22.)
-406 Chapter 23
-4 “The wages of labour are advanced by capitalists in the case of less than one fourth of the labourers
-of the earth.” (Rich. Jones: “Textbook of Lectures on the Pol. Econ. of Nations.” Hertford, 1852, p.
-36.)
-5 “Though the manufacturer” (i.e., the labourer) “has his wages advanced to him by his master, he in
-reality costs him no expense, the value of these wages being generally reserved, together with a profit,
-in the improved value of the subject upon which his labour is bestowed.” (A. Smith, l. c., Book II. ch.
-III, p. 311.)
-6 “This is a remarkably peculiar property of productive labour. Whatever is productively consumed is
-capital and it becomes capital by consumption.” (James Mill, l. c., p. 242.) James Mill, however, never
-got on the track of this “remarkably peculiar property.”
-7 “It is true indeed, that the first introducing a manufacture employs many poor, but they cease not to
-be so, and the continuance of it makes many.” (“Reasons for a Limited Exportation of Wool.”
-London, 1677, p. 19.) “The farmer now absurdly asserts, that he keeps the poor. They are indeed kept
-in misery.” (“Reasons for the Late Increase of the Poor Rates: or a Comparative View of the Prices of
-Labour and Provisions.” London, 1777, p. 31.)
-8 Rossi would not declaim so emphatically against this, had he really penetrated the secret of
-“productive consumption.”
-9 “The labourers in the mines of S. America, whose daily task (the heaviest perhaps in the world)
-consists in bringing to the surface on their shoulders a load of metal weighing from 180 to 200
-pounds, from a depth of 450 feet, live on bread and beans only; they themselves would prefer the
-bread alone for food, but their masters, who have found out that the men cannot work so hard on
-bread, treat them like horses, and compel them to eat beans; beans, however, are relatively much
-richer in bone-earth (phosphate of lime) than is bread.” (Liebig, l. c., vol. 1., p. 194, note.)
-10 James Mill, l. c., p. 238
-11 “If the price of labour should rise so high that, notwithstanding the increase of capital, no more
-could be employed, I should say that such increase of capital would be still unproductively
-consumed.” (Ricardo, l. c., p. 163.)
-12 “The only productive consumption, properly so called, is the consumption or destruction of wealth”
-(he alludes to the means of production) “by capitalists with a view to reproduction.... The workman ...
-is a productive consumer to the person who employs him, and to the State, but not, strictly speaking,
-to himself.” (Malthus’ “Definitions, &c.,” p. 30.)
-13 “The only thing, of which one can say, that it is stored up and prepared beforehand, is the skill of
-the labourer.... The accumulation and storage of skilled labour, that most important operation, is, as
-regards the great mass of labourers, accomplished without any capital whatever.” (Th. Hodgskin:
-“Labour Defended, &c.,” p. 13.)
-14 “That letter might be looked upon as the manifesto of the manufacturers.” (Ferrand: “Motion on the
-Cotton Famine.” H.o.C., 27th April, 1863.)
-15 It will not be forgotten that this same capital sings quite another song, under ordinary
-circumstances, when there is a question of reducing wages. Then the masters exclaim with one voice:
-“The factory operatives should keep in wholesome remembrance the fact that theirs is really a low
-species of skilled labour, and that there is none which is more easily acquired, or of its quality more
-amply remunerated, or which, by a short training of the least expert, can be more quickly, as well as
-abundantly, acquired ... The master’s machinery” (which we now learn can be replaced with
-advantage in 12 months,) “really plays a far more important part in the business of production than the
-labour and skill of the operative” (who cannot now be replaced under 30 years), “which six months’
-education can reach, and a common labourer can learn.” (See ante, p. 423.)
-407 Chapter 23
-16 Parliament did not vote a single farthing in aid of emigration, but simply passed some Acts
-empowering the municipal corporations to keep the operatives in a half-starved state, i.e., to exploit
-them at less than the normal wages. On the other hand, when 3 years later, the cattle disease broke out,
-Parliament broke wildly through its usages and voted, straight off, millions for indemnifying the
-millionaire landlords, whose farmers in any event came off without loss, owing to the rise in the price
-of meat. The bull-like bellow of the landed proprietors at the opening of Parliament, in 1866, showed
-that a man can worship the cow Sabala without being a Hindu, and can change himself into an ox
-without being a Jupiter.
-17 “L’ouvrier demandait de la subsistence pour vivre, le chef demandait du travail pour gagner.” [The
-worker required the means of subsistence to live, the boss required labour to make a profit] (Sismondi,
-l. c., p. 91.)
-18 A boorishly clumsy form of this bondage exists in the county of Durham. This is one of the few
-counties, in which circumstances do not secure to the farmer undisputed proprietary rights over the
-agricultural labourer. The mining industry allows the latter some choice. In this county, the farmer,
-contrary to the custom elsewhere, rents only such farms as have on them labourers’ cottages. The rent
-of the cottage is a part of the wages. These cottages are known as “hinds’ houses.” They are let to the
-labourers in consideration of certain feudal services, under a contract called “bondage,” which,
-amongst other things, binds the labourer, during the time he is employed elsewhere, to leave some
-one, say his daughter, &c., to supply his place. The labourer himself is called a “bondsman.” The
-relationship here set up also shows how individual consumption by the labourer becomes consumption
-on behalf of capital ‒ or productive consumption ‒ from quite a new point of view: “It is curious to
-observe that the very dung of the hind and bondsman is the perquisite of the calculating lord ... and the
-lord will allow no privy but his own to exist in the neighbourhood, and will rather give a bit of manure
-here and there for a garden than bate any part of his seigneurial right.” (“Public Health, Report VII.,
-1864,” p. 188.)
-19 It will not be forgotten, that, with respect to the labour of children, &c., even the formality of a
-voluntary sale disappears.
-20 “Capital pre-supposes wage labour, and wage labour pre-supposes capital. One is a necessary
-condition to the existence of the other; they mutually call each other into existence. Does an operative
-in a cotton-factory produce nothing but cotton goods? No, he produces capital. He produces values
-that give fresh command over his labour, and that, by means of such command, create fresh values.”
-(Karl Marx: “Lohnarbeit und Kapital,” in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung: No. 266, 7th April, 1849.) The
-articles published under the above title in the N. Rh. Z. are parts of some lectures given by me on that
-subject, in 1847, in the German “Arbeiter-Verein” at Brussels, the publication of which was
-interrupted by the revolution of February.
-Chapter 24: Conversion of Surplus-Value into
-Capital
-Section 1: Capitalist Production on a Progressively Increasing
-Scale. Transition of the Laws of Property that Characterise
-Production of Commodities into Laws of Capitalist
-Appropriation
-Hitherto we have investigated how surplus-value emanates from capital; we have now to see how
-capital arises from surplus-value. Employing surplus-value as capital, reconverting it into capital,
-is called accumulation of capital.1
-First let us consider this transaction from the standpoint of the individual capitalist. Suppose a
-spinner to have advanced a capital of £10,000, of which four-fifths (£8,000) are laid out in cotton,
-machinery, &c., and one-fifth (£2,000) in wages. Let him produce 240,000 lbs. of yarn annually,
-having a value of £2,000. The rate of surplus-value being 100%, the surplus-value lies in the
-surplus or net product of 40,000 lbs. of yarn, one-sixth of the gross product, with a value of
-£2,000 which will be realised by a sale. £2,000 is £2,000. We can neither see nor smell in this
-sum of money a trace of surplus-value. When we know that a given value is surplus-value, we
-know how its owner came by it; but that does not alter the nature either of value or of money.
-In order to convert this additional sum of £2,000 into capital, the master-spinner will, all
-circumstances remaining as before, advance four-fifths of it (£1,600) in the purchase of cotton,
-&c., and one-fifth (£400) in the purchase of additional spinners, who will find in the market the
-necessaries of life whose value the master has advanced to them.
-Then the new capital of £2,000 functions in the spinning mill, and brings in, in its turn, a surplus-
-value of £400.
-The capital value was originally advanced in the money form. The surplus-value on the contrary
-is, originally, the value of a definite portion of the gross product. If this gross product be sold,
-converted into money, the capital value regains its original form. From this moment the capital
-value and the surplus-value are both of them sums of money, and their reconversion into capital
-takes place in precisely the same way. The one, as well as the other, is laid out by the capitalist in
-the purchase of commodities that place him in a position to begin afresh the fabrication of his
-goods, and this time, on an extended scale. But in order to be able to buy those commodities, he
-must find them ready in the market.
-His own yarns circulate, only because he brings his annual product to market, as all other
-capitalists likewise do with their commodities. But these commodities, before coming to market,
-were part of the general annual product, part of the total mass of objects of every kind, into which
-the sum of the individual capitals, i.e., the total capital of society, had been converted in the
-course of the year, and of which each capitalist had in hand only an aliquot part. The transactions
-in the market effectuate only the interchange of the individual components of this annual product,
-transfer them from one hand to another, but can neither augment the total annual production, nor
-alter the nature of the objects produced. Hence the use that can be made of the total annual
-product, depends entirely upon its own composition, but in no way upon circulation.
-409 Chapter 24
-The annual production must in the first place furnish all those objects (use values) from which the
-material components of capital, used up in the course of the year, have to be replaced. Deducting
-these there remains the net or surplus-product, in which the surplus-value lies. And of what does
-this surplus-product consist? Only of things destined to satisfy the wants and desires of the
-capitalist class, things which, consequently, enter into the consumption fund of the capitalists?
-Were that the case, the cup of surplus-value would be drained to the very dregs, and nothing but
-simple reproduction would ever take place.
-To accumulate it is necessary to convert a portion of the surplus-product into capital. But we
-cannot, except by a miracle, convert into capital anything but such articles as can be employed in
-the labour process (i.e., means of production), and such further articles as are suitable for the
-sustenance of the labourer (i.e., means of subsistence). Consequently, a part of the annual surplus
-labour must have been applied to the production of additional means of production and
-subsistence, over and above the quantity of these things required to replace the capital advanced.
-In one word, surplus-value is convertible into capital solely because the surplus-product, whose
-value it is, already comprises the material elements of new capital.2
-Now in order to allow of these elements actually functioning as capital, the capitalist class
-requires additional labour. If the exploitation of the labourers already employed do not increase,
-either extensively or intensively, then additional labour-power must be found. For this the
-mechanism of capitalist production provides beforehand, by converting the working class into a
-class dependent on wages, a class whose ordinary wages suffice, not only for its maintenance, but
-for its increase. It is only necessary for capital to incorporate this additional labour-power,
-annually supplied by the working class in the shape of labourers of all ages, with the surplus
-means of production comprised in the annual produce, and the conversion of surplus-value into
-capital is complete. From a concrete point of view, accumulation resolves itself into the
-reproduction of capital on a progressively increasing scale. The circle in which simple
-reproduction moves, alters its form, and, to use Sismondi’s expression, changes into a spiral.3
-Let us now return to our illustration. It is the old story: Abraham begat Isaac, Isaac begat Jacob,
-and so on. The original capital of £10,000 brings in a surplus-value of £2,000, which is
-capitalised. The new capital of £2,000 brings in a surplus-value of £400, and this, too, is
-capitalised, converted into a second additional capital, which, in its turn, produces a further
-surplus-value of £80. And so the ball rolls on.
-We here leave out of consideration the portion of the surplus-value consumed by the capitalist.
-Just as little does it concern us, for the moment, whether the additional capital is joined on to the
-original capital, or is separated from it to function independently; whether the same capitalist,
-who accumulated it employs it, or whether he hands it over to another. This only we must not
-forget, that by the side of the newly-formed capital, the original capital continues to reproduce
-itself, and to produce surplus-value, and that this is also true of all accumulated capital, and the
-additional capital engendered by it.
-The original capital was formed by the advance of £10,000. How did the owner become
-possessed of it? “By his own labour and that of his forefathers,” answer unanimously the
-spokesmen of Political Economy.4 And, in fact, their supposition appears the only one consonant
-with the laws of the production of commodities.
-But it is quite otherwise with regard to the additional capital of £2,000. How that originated we
-know perfectly well. There is not one single atom of its value that does not owe its existence to
-unpaid labour. The means of production, with which the additional labour-power is incorporated,
-as well as the necessaries with which the labourers are sustained, are nothing but component parts
-of the surplus-product, of the tribute annually exacted from the working class by the capitalist
-410 Chapter 24
-class. Though the latter with a portion of that tribute purchases the additional labour-power even
-at its full price, so that equivalent is exchanged for equivalent, yet the transaction is for all that
-only the old dodge of every conqueror who buys commodities from the conquered with the
-money he has robbed them of.
-If the additional capital employs the person who produced it, this producer must not only continue
-to augment the value of the original capital, but must buy back the fruits of his previous labour
-with more labour than they cost. When viewed as a transaction between the capitalist class and
-the working class, it makes no difference that additional labourers are employed by means of the
-unpaid labour of the previously employed labourers. The capitalist may even convert the
-additional capital into a machine that throws the producers of that capital out of work, and that
-replaces them by a few children. In every case the working class creates by the surplus labour of
-one year the capital destined to employ additional labour in the following year.5 And this is what
-is called: creating capital out of capital.
-The accumulation of the first additional capital of £2,000 presupposes a value of £10,000
-belonging to the capitalist by virtue of his “primitive labour,” and advanced by him. The second
-additional capital of £400 presupposes, on the contrary, only the previous accumulation of the
-£2,000, of which the £400 is the surplus-value capitalised. The ownership of past unpaid labour is
-thenceforth the sole condition for the appropriation of living unpaid labour on a constantly
-increasing scale. The more the capitalist has accumulated, the more is he able to accumulate.
-In so far as the surplus-value, of which the additional capital, No. 1, consists, is the result of the
-purchase of labour-power with part of the original capital, a purchase that conformed to the laws
-of the exchange of commodities, and that, from a legal standpoint, presupposes nothing beyond
-the free disposal, on the part of the labourer, of his own capacities, and on the part of the owner of
-money or commodities, of the values that belong to him; in so far as the additional capital, No. 2,
-&c., is the mere result of No. 1, and, therefore, a consequence of the above conditions; in so far as
-each single transaction invariably conforms to the laws of the exchange of commodities, the
-capitalist buying labour-power, the labourer selling it, and we will assume at its real value; in so
-far as all this is true, it is evident that the laws of appropriation or of private property, laws that
-are based on the production and circulation of commodities, become by their own inner and
-inexorable dialectic changed into their very opposite. The exchange of equivalents, the original
-operation with which we started, has now become turned round in such a way that there is only an
-apparent exchange. This is owing to the fact, first, that the capital which is exchanged for labour-
-power is itself but a portion of the product of others’ labour appropriated without an equivalent;
-and, secondly, that this capital must not only be replaced by its producer, but replaced together
-with an added surplus. The relation of exchange subsisting between capitalist and labourer
-becomes a mere semblance appertaining to the process of circulation, a mere form, foreign to the
-real nature of the transaction, and only mystifying it. The ever repeated purchase and sale of
-labour-power is now the mere form; what really takes place is this – the capitalist again and again
-appropriates, without equivalent, a portion of the previously materialised labour of others, and
-exchanges it for a greater quantity of living labour. At first the rights of property seemed to us to
-be based on a man’s own labour. At least, some such assumption was necessary since only
-commodity-owners with equal rights confronted each other, and the sole means by which a man
-could become possessed of the commodities of others, was by alienating his own commodities;
-and these could be replaced by labour alone. Now, however, property turns out to be the right, on
-the part of the capitalist, to appropriate the unpaid labour of others or its product, and to be the
-impossibility, on the part of the labourer, of appropriating his own product. The separation of
-411 Chapter 24
-property from labour has become the necessary consequence of a law that apparently originated
-in their identity.6
-Therefore,7 however much the capitalist mode of appropriation may seem to fly in the face of the
-original laws of commodity production, it nevertheless arises, not from a violation, but, on the
-contrary, from the application of these laws. Let us make this clear once more by briefly
-reviewing the consecutive phases of motion whose culminating point is capitalist accumulation.
-We saw, in the first place, that the original conversion of a sum of values into capital was
-achieved in complete accordance with the laws of exchange. One party to the contract sells his
-labour-power, the other buys it. The former receives the value of his commodity, whose use value
-– labour – is thereby alienated to the buyer. Means of production which already belong to the
-latter are then transformed by him, with the aid of labour equally belonging to him, into a new
-product which is likewise lawfully his.
-The value of this product includes: first, the value of the used-up means of production. Useful
-labour cannot consume these means of production without transferring their value to the new
-product, but, to be saleable, labour-power must be capable of supplying useful labour in the
-branch of industry in which it is to be employed.
-The value of the new product further includes: the equivalent of the value of the labour-power
-together with a surplus-value. This is so because the value of the labour-power – sold for a
-definite length of time, say a day, a week, etc. – is less than the value created by its use during
-that time. But the worker has received payment for the exchange-value of his labour-power and
-by so doing has alienated its use value – this being the case in every sale and purchase.
-The fact that this particular commodity, labour-power, possesses the peculiar use value of
-supplying labour, and therefore of creating value, cannot affect the general law of commodity
-production. If, therefore, the magnitude of value advanced in wages is not merely found again in
-the product, but is found there augmented by a surplus-value, this is not because the seller has
-been defrauded, for he has really received the value of his commodity; it is due solely to the fact
-that this commodity has been used up by the buyer.
-The law of exchange requires equality only between the exchange-values of the commodities
-given in exchange for one another. From the very outset it presupposes even a difference between
-their use values and it has nothing whatever to do with their consumption, which only begins after
-the deal is closed and executed.
-Thus the original conversion of money into capital is achieved in the most exact accordance with
-the economic laws of commodity production and with the right of property derived from them.
-Nevertheless, its result is:
-(1) that the product belongs to the capitalist and not to the worker;
-(2) that the value of this product includes, besides the value of the capital advanced, a surplus-
-value which costs the worker labour but the capitalist nothing, and which none the less becomes
-the legitimate property of the capitalist;
-(3) that the worker has retained his labour-power and can sell it anew if he can find a buyer.
-Simple reproduction is only the periodical repetition of this first operation; each time money is
-converted afresh into capital. Thus the law is not broken; on the contrary, it is merely enabled to
-operate continuously. “Several successive acts of exchange have only made the last represent the
-first” (Sismondi, “Nouveaux Principes, etc.,” p. 70).
-And yet we have seen that simple reproduction suffices to stamp this first operation, in so far as it
-is conceived as an isolated process, with a totally changed character. “Of those who share the
-412 Chapter 24
-national income among themselves, the one side (the workers) acquire every year a fresh right to
-their share by fresh work; the others (the capitalists) have already acquired, by work done
-originally, a permanent right to their share” (Sismondi, l. c., pp. 110, 111). It is indeed notorious
-that the sphere of labour is not the only one in which primogeniture works miracles.
-Nor does it matter if simple reproduction is replaced by reproduction on an extended scale, by
-accumulation. In the former case the capitalist squanders the whole surplus-value in dissipation,
-in the latter he demonstrates his bourgeois virtue by consuming only a portion of it and
-converting the rest into money.
-The surplus-value is his property; it has never belonged to anyone else. If he advances it for the
-purposes of production, the advances made come from his own funds, exactly as on the day when
-he first entered the market. The fact that on this occasion the funds are derived from the unpaid
-labour of his workers makes absolutely no difference. If worker B is paid out of the surplus-value
-which worker A produced, then, in the first place, A furnished that surplus-value without having
-the just price of his commodity cut by a half-penny, and, in the second place, the transaction is no
-concern of B’s whatever. What B claims, and has a right to claim, is that the capitalist should pay
-him the value of his labour-power. “Both were still gainers: the worker because he was advanced
-the fruits of his labour” (should read: of the unpaid labour of other workers) “before the work was
-done” (should read: before his own labour had borne fruit); “the employer (le maître), because the
-labour of this worker was worth more than his wages” (should read: produced more value than
-the value of his wages). (Sismondi, l. c., p. 135.)
-To be sure, the matter looks quite different if we consider capitalist production in the
-uninterrupted flow of its renewal, and if, in place of the individual capitalist and the individual
-worker, we view in their totality, the capitalist class and the working class confronting each other.
-But in so doing we should be applying standards entirely foreign to commodity production.
-Only buyer and seller, mutually independent, face each other in commodity production. The
-relations between them cease on the day when the term stipulated in the contract they concluded
-expires. If the transaction is repeated, it is repeated as the result of a new agreement which has
-nothing to do with the previous one and which only by chance brings the same seller together
-again with the same buyer.
-If, therefore, commodity production, or one of its associated processes, is to be judged according
-to its own economic laws, we must consider each act of exchange by itself, apart from any
-connexion with the act of exchange preceding it and that following it. And since sales and
-purchases are negotiated solely between particular individuals, it is not admissible to seek here
-for relations between whole social classes.
-However long a series of periodical reproductions and preceding accumulations the capital
-functioning today may have passed through, it always preserves its original virginity. So long as
-the laws of exchange are observed in every single act of exchange the mode of appropriation can
-be completely revolutionised without in any way affecting the property rights which correspond
-to commodity production. These same rights remain in force both at the outset, when the product
-belongs to its producer, who, exchanging equivalent for equivalent, can enrich himself only by
-his own labour, and also in the period of capitalism, when social wealth becomes to an ever-
-increasing degree the property of those who are in a position to appropriate continually and ever
-afresh the unpaid labour of others.
-This result becomes inevitable from the moment there is a free sale, by the labourer himself, of
-labour-power as a commodity. But it is also only from then onwards that commodity production
-is generalised and becomes the typical form of production; it is only from then onwards that, from
-413 Chapter 24
-the first, every product is produced for sale and all wealth produced goes through the sphere of
-circulation. Only when and where wage labour is its basis does commodity production impose
-itself upon society as a whole; but only then and there also does it unfold all its hidden
-potentialities. To say that the supervention of wage labour adulterates commodity production is to
-say that commodity production must not develop if it is to remain unadulterated. To the extent
-that commodity production, in accordance with its own inherent laws, develops further, into
-capitalist production, the property laws of commodity production change into the laws of
-capitalist appropriation.8
-We have seen that even in the case of simple reproduction, all capital, whatever its original
-source, becomes converted into accumulated capital, capitalised surplus-value. But in the flood of
-production all the capital originally advanced becomes a vanishing quantity (magnitudo
-evanescens, in the mathematical sense), compared with the directly accumulated capital, i.e., with
-the surplus-value or surplus-product that is reconverted into capital, whether it functions in the
-hands of its accumulator, or in those of others. Hence, Political Economy describes capital in
-general as “accumulated wealth” (converted surplus-value or revenue), “that is employed over
-again in the production of surplus-value,”9 and the capitalist as “the owner of surplus-value.”10 It
-is merely another way of expressing the same thing to say that all existing capital is accumulated
-or capitalised interest, for interest is a mere fragment of surplus-value.11
-Section 2: Erroneous Conception, by Political Economy, of
-Reproduction on a Progressively Increasing Scale
-Before we further investigate accumulation or the reconversion of surplus-value into capital, we
-must brush on one side an ambiguity introduced by the classical economists.
-Just as little as the commodities that the capitalist buys with a part of the surplus-value for his
-own consumption, serve the purpose of production and of creation of value, so little is the labour
-that he buys for the satisfaction of his natural and social requirements, productive labour. Instead
-of converting surplus-value into capital, he, on the contrary, by the purchase of those
-commodities and that labour, consumes or expends it as revenue. In the face of the habitual mode
-of life of the old feudal nobility, which, as Hegel rightly says, “consists in consuming what is in
-hand,” and more especially displays itself in the luxury of personal retainers, it was extremely
-important for bourgeois economy to promulgate the doctrine that accumulation of capital is the
-first duty of every citizen, and to preach without ceasing, that a man cannot accumulate, if he eats
-up all his revenue, instead of spending a good part of it in the acquisition of additional productive
-labourers, who bring in more than they cost. On the other hand the economists had to contend
-against the popular prejudice, that confuses capitalist production with hoarding,12 and fancies that
-accumulated wealth is either wealth that is rescued from being destroyed in its existing form, i.e.,
-from being consumed, or wealth that is withdrawn from circulation. Exclusion of money from
-circulation would also exclude absolutely its self-expansion as capital, while accumulation of a
-hoard in the shape of commodities would be sheer tomfoolery.13 The accumulation of
-commodities in great masses is the result either of over-production or of a stoppage of
-circulation.14 It is true that the popular mind is impressed by the sight, on the one hand, of the
-mass of goods that are stored up for gradual consumption by the rich,15 and on the other hand, by
-the formation of reserve stocks; the latter, a phenomenon that is common to all modes of
-production, and on which we shall dwell for a moment, when we come to analyse circulation.
-Classical economy is therefore quite right, when it maintains that the consumption of surplus-
-products by productive, instead of by unproductive labourers, is a characteristic feature of the
-414 Chapter 24
-process of accumulation. But at this point the mistakes also begin. Adam Smith has made it the
-fashion, to represent accumulation as nothing more than consumption of surplus products by
-productive labourers, which amounts to saying, that the capitalising of surplus-value consists in
-merely turning surplus-value into labour-power.
-Let us see what Ricardo, e.g., says:
-“It must be understood that all the productions of a country are consumed; but it
-makes the greatest difference imaginable whether they are consumed by those
-who reproduce, or by those who do not reproduce another value. When we say
-that revenue is saved, and added to capital, what we mean is, that the portion of
-revenue, so said to be added to capital, is consumed by productive instead of
-unproductive labourers. There can be no greater error than in supposing that
-capital is increased by non-consumption.” 16
-There can be no greater error than that which Ricardo and all subsequent economists repeat after
-A. Smith, viz., that
-“the part of revenue, of which it is said, it has been added to capital, is consumed
-by productive labourers.”
-According to this, all surplus-value that is changed into capital becomes variable capital. So far
-from this being the case, the surplus-value, like the original capital, divides itself into constant
-capital and variable capital, into means of production and labour-power. Labour-power is the
-form under which variable capital exists during the process of production. In this process the
-labour-power is itself consumed by the capitalist while the means of production are consumed by
-the labour-power in the exercise of its function, labour. At the same time, the money paid for the
-purchase of the labour-power, is converted into necessaries, that are consumed, not by
-“productive labour,” but by the “productive labourer.” Adam Smith, by a fundamentally
-perverted analysis, arrives at the absurd conclusion, that even though each individual capital is
-divided into a constant and a variable part, the capital of society resolves itself only into variable
-capital, i.e., is laid out exclusively in payment of wages. For instance, suppose a cloth
-manufacturer converts £2,000 into capital. One portion he lays out in buying weavers, the other in
-woollen yarn, machinery, &c. But the people, from whom he buys the yarn and the machinery,
-pay for labour with a part of the purchase money, and so on until the whole £2,000 are spent in
-the payment of wages, i.e., until the entire product represented by the £2,000 has been consumed
-by productive labourers. It is evident that the whole gist of this argument lies in the words “and so
-on,” which send us from pillar to post. In truth, Adam Smith breaks his investigation off, just
-where its difficulties begin.17
-The annual process of reproduction is easily understood, so long as we keep in view merely the
-sum total of the year’s production. But every single component of this product must be brought
-into the market as a commodity, and there the difficulty begins. The movements of the individual
-capitals, and of the personal revenues, cross and intermingle and are lost in the general change of
-places, in the circulation of the wealth of society; this dazes the sight, and propounds very
-complicated problems for solution. In the third part of Book II. I shall give the analysis of the real
-bearings of the facts. It is one of the great merits of the Physiocrats, that in their Tableau
-économique they were the first to attempt to depict the annual production in the shape in which it
-is presented to us after passing through the process of circulation.18
-For the rest, it is a matter of course, that Political Economy, acting in the interests of the capitalist
-class, has not failed to exploit the doctrine of Adam Smith, viz., that the whole of that part of the
-surplus-product which is converted into capital, is consumed by the working class.
-415 Chapter 24
-Section 3: Separation of Surplus-Value into Capital and
-Revenue. The Abstinence Theory
-In the last preceding chapter, we treated surplus-value (or the surplus-product) solely as a fund for
-supplying the individual consumption of the capitalist. In this chapter we have, so far, treated it
-solely as a fund for accumulation. It is, however, neither the one nor the other, but is both
-together. One portion is consumed by the capitalist as revenue,19 the other is employed as capital,
-is accumulated.
-Given the mass of surplus-value, then, the larger the one of these parts, the smaller is the other.
-Caeteris paribus, the ratio of these parts determines the magnitude of the accumulation. But it is
-by the owner of the surplus-value, by the capitalist alone, that the division is made. It is his
-deliberate act. That part of the tribute exacted by him which he accumulates, is said to be saved
-by him, because he does not eat it, i.e., because he performs the function of a capitalist, and
-enriches himself.
-Except as personified capital, the capitalist has no historical value, and no right to that historical
-existence, which, to use an expression of the witty Lichnowsky, “hasn’t got no date.” And so far
-only is the necessity for his own transitory existence implied in the transitory necessity for the
-capitalist mode of production. But, so far as he is personified capital, it is not values in use and
-the enjoyment of them, but exchange-value and its augmentation, that spur him into action.
-Fanatically bent on making value expand itself, he ruthlessly forces the human race to produce for
-production’s sake; he thus forces the development of the productive powers of society, and
-creates those material conditions, which alone can form the real basis of a higher form of society,
-a society in which the full and free development of every individual forms the ruling principle.
-Only as personified capital is the capitalist respectable. As such, he shares with the miser the
-passion for wealth as wealth. But that which in the miser is a mere idiosyncrasy, is, in the
-capitalist, the effect of the social mechanism, of which he is but one of the wheels. Moreover, the
-development of capitalist production makes it constantly necessary to keep increasing the amount
-of the capital laid out in a given industrial undertaking, and competition makes the immanent
-laws of capitalist production to be felt by each individual capitalist, as external coercive laws. It
-compels him to keep constantly extending his capital, in order to preserve it, but extend it he
-cannot, except by means of progressive accumulation.
-So far, therefore, as his actions are a mere function of capital – endowed as capital is, in his
-person, with consciousness and a will – his own private consumption is a robbery perpetrated on
-accumulation, just as in book-keeping by double entry, the private expenditure of the capitalist is
-placed on the debtor side of his account against his capital. To accumulate, is to conquer the
-world of social wealth, to increase the mass of human beings exploited by him, and thus to extend
-both the direct and the indirect sway of the capitalist.20
-But original sin is at work everywhere. As capitalist production, accumulation, and wealth,
-become developed, the capitalist ceases to be the mere incarnation of capital. He has a fellow-
-feeling for his own Adam, and his education gradually enables him to smile at the rage for
-asceticism, as a mere prejudice of the old-fashioned miser. While the capitalist of the classical
-type brands individual consumption as a sin against his function, and as “abstinence” from
-accumulating, the modernised capitalist is capable of looking upon accumulation as “abstinence”
-from pleasure.
-“Two souls, alas, do dwell with in his breast;
-The one is ever parting from the other.”21
-416 Chapter 24
-At the historical dawn of capitalist production, – and every capitalist upstart has personally to go
-through this historical stage – avarice, and desire to get rich, are the ruling passions. But the
-progress of capitalist production not only creates a world of delights; it lays open, in speculation
-and the credit system, a thousand sources of sudden enrichment. When a certain stage of
-development has been reached, a conventional degree of prodigality, which is also an exhibition
-of wealth, and consequently a source of credit, becomes a business necessity to the “unfortunate”
-capitalist. Luxury enters into capital’s expenses of representation. Moreover, the capitalist gets
-rich, not like the miser, in proportion to his personal labour and restricted consumption, but at the
-same rate as he squeezes out the labour-power of others, and enforces on the labourer abstinence
-from all life’s enjoyments. Although, therefore, the prodigality of the capitalist never possesses
-the bona fide character of the open-handed feudal lord’s prodigality, but, on the contrary, has
-always lurking behind it the most sordid avarice and the most anxious calculation, yet his
-expenditure grows with his accumulation, without the one necessarily restricting the other. But
-along with this growth, there is at the same time developed in his breast, a Faustian conflict
-between the passion for accumulation, and the desire for enjoyment.
-Dr. Aikin says in a work published in 1795:
-“The trade of Manchester may be divided into four periods. First, when
-manufacturers were obliged to work hard for their livelihood.”
-They enriched themselves chiefly by robbing the parents, whose children were bound as
-apprentices to them; the parents paid a high premium, while the apprentices were starved. On the
-other hand, the average profits were low, and to accumulate, extreme parsimony was requisite.
-They lived like misers and were far from consuming even the interest on their capital.
-“The second period, when they had begun to acquire little fortunes, but worked as
-hard as before,” – for direct exploitation of labour costs labour, as every slave-
-driver knows – “and lived in as plain a manner as before.... The third, when luxury
-began, and the trade was pushed by sending out riders for orders into every market
-town in the Kingdom.... It is probable that few or no capitals of £3,000 to £4,000
-acquired by trade existed here before 1690. However, about that time, or a little
-later, the traders had got money beforehand, and began to build modern brick
-houses, instead of those of wood and plaster.”
-Even in the early part of the 18th century, a Manchester manufacturer, who placed a pint of
-foreign wine before his guests, exposed himself to the remarks and headshakings of all his
-neighbours. Before the rise of machinery, a manufacturer’s evening expenditure at the public
-house where they all met, never exceeded sixpence for a glass of punch, and a penny for a screw
-of tobacco. It was not till 1758, and this marks an epoch, that a person actually engaged in
-business was seen with an equipage of his own.
-“The fourth period,” the last 30 years of the 18th century, “is that in which
-expense and luxury have made great progress, and was supported by a trade
-extended by means of riders and factors through every part of Europe.”22
-What would the good Dr. Aikin say if he could rise from his grave and see the Manchester of
-today?
-Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets! “Industry furnishes the material which
-saving accumulates.”23 Therefore, save, save, i.e., reconvert the greatest possible portion of
-surplus-value, or surplus-product into capital! Accumulation for accumulation’s sake, production
-for production’s sake: by this formula classical economy expressed the historical mission of the
-bourgeoisie, and did not for a single instant deceive itself over the birth-throes of wealth.24 But
-417 Chapter 24
-what avails lamentation in the face of historical necessity? If to classical economy, the proletarian
-is but a machine for the production of surplus-value; on the other hand, the capitalist is in its eyes
-only a machine for the conversion of this surplus-value into additional capital. Political Economy
-takes the historical function of the capitalist in bitter earnest. In order to charm out of his bosom
-the awful conflict between the desire for enjoyment and the chase after riches, Malthus, about the
-year 1820, advocated a division of labour, which assigns to the capitalist actually engaged in
-production, the business of accumulating, and to the other sharers in surplus-value, to the
-landlords, the place-men, the beneficed clergy, &c., the business of spending. It is of the highest
-importance, he says,
-“to keep separate the passion for expenditure and the passion for accumulation.”25
-The capitalists having long been good livers and men of the world, uttered loud cries. What,
-exclaimed one of their spokesmen, a disciple of Ricardo, Mr. Malthus preaches high rents, heavy
-taxes, &c., so that the pressure of the spur may constantly be kept on the industrious by
-unproductive consumers! By all means, production, production on a constantly increasing scale,
-runs the shibboleth; but
-“production will, by such a process, be far more curbed in than spurred on. Nor is
-it quite fair thus to maintain in idleness a number of persons, only to pinch others,
-who are likely, from their characters, if you can force them to work, to work with
-success.”26
-Unfair as he finds it to spur on the industrial capitalist, by depriving his bread of its butter, yet he
-thinks it necessary to reduce the labourer’s wages to a minimum "to keep him industrious.” Nor
-does he for a moment conceal the fact, that the appropriation of unpaid labour is the secret of
-surplus-value.
-“Increased demand on the part of the labourers means nothing more than their
-willingness to take less of their own product for themselves, and leave a greater
-part of it to their employers; and if it be said, that this begets glut, by lessening
-consumption” (on the part of the labourers), “I can only reply that glut is
-synonymous with large profits.”27
-The learned disputation, how the booty pumped out of the labourer may be divided, with most
-advantage to accumulation, between the industrial capitalist and the rich idler, was hushed in face
-of the revolution of July. Shortly afterwards, the town proletariat at Lyons sounded the tocsin of
-revolution, and the country proletariat in England began to set fire to farm-yards and corn-stacks.
-On this side of the Channel Owenism began to spread; on the other side, St. Simonism and
-Fourierism. The hour of vulgar economy had struck. Exactly a year before Nassau W. Senior
-discovered at Manchester, that the profit (including interest) of capital is the product of the last
-hour of the twelve, he had announced to the world another discovery.
-“I substitute,” he proudly says, “for the word capital, considered as an instrument
-of production, the word abstinence.”
-An unparalleled sample this, of the discoveries of vulgar economy! It substitutes for an economic
-category, a sycophantic phrase – voilà tout. [that’s all]
-“When the savage,” says Senior, “makes bows, he exercises an industry, but he
-does not practise abstinence.”28
-This explains how and why, in the earlier states of society, the implements of labour were
-fabricated without abstinence on the part of the capitalist.
-“The more society progresses, the more abstinence is demanded,”29
-418 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 capitalist30 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.”
-419 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 naïvely:
-“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
-420 Chapter 24
-eat very little bread.”39 “To which may be added,” our essayist goes on, “that their
-drink is either water or other small liquors, so that they spend very little money....
-These things are very difficult to be brought about; but they are not impracticable,
-since they have been effected both in France and in Holland.”40
-Twenty years later, an American humbug, the baronised Yankee, Benjamin Thompson (alias
-Count Rumford) followed the same line of philanthropy to the great satisfaction of God and man.
-His “Essays” are a cookery book with receipts of all kinds for replacing by some succedaneum
-the ordinary dear food of the labourer. The following is a particularly successful receipt of this
-wonderful philosopher:
-“5 lbs. of barleymeal, 7½d.; 5 lbs. of Indian corn, 6¼d.; 3d. worth of red herring,
-1d. salt, 1d. vinegar, 2d. pepper and sweet herbs, in all 20¾.; make a soup for 64
-men, and at the medium price of barley and of Indian corn ... this soup may be
-provided at ¼d., the portion of 20 ounces.”41
-With the advance of capitalistic production, the adulteration of food rendered Thompson’s ideal
-superfluous.42 At the end of the 18th and during the first ten years of the 19th century, the English
-farmers and landlords enforced the absolute minimum of wage, by paying the agricultural
-labourers less than the minimum in the form of wages, and the remainder in the shape of
-parochial relief. An example of the waggish way in which the English Dogberries acted in their
-“legal” fixing of a wages tariff:
-“The squires of Norfolk had dined, says Mr. Burke, when they fixed the rate of
-wages; the squires of Berks evidently thought the labourers ought not to do so,
-when they fixed the rate of wages at Speenhamland, 1795.... There they decide
-that ‘income (weekly) should be 3s. for a man,’ when the gallon or half-peck loaf
-of 8 lbs. 11 oz. is at 1s., and increase regularly till bread is 1s. 5d.; when it is
-above that sum decrease regularly till it be at 2s., and then his food should be 1/5
-th less.” 43
-Before the Committee of Inquiry of the House of Lords, 1814, a certain A. Bennett, a large
-farmer, magistrate, poor-law guardian, and wage-regulator, was asked:
-“Has any proportion of the value of daily labour been made up to the labourers out
-of the poors’ rate?” Answer: “Yes, it has; the weekly income of every family is
-made up to the gallon loaf (8 lbs. 11 oz.), and 3d. per head!... The gallon loaf per
-week is what we suppose sufficient for the maintenance of every person in the
-family for the week; and the 3d. is for clothes, and if the parish think proper to
-find clothes; the 3d. is deducted. This practice goes through all the western part of
-Wiltshire, and, I believe, throughout the country.”44 “For years,” exclaims a
-bourgeois author of that time, “they (the farmers) have degraded a respectable
-class of their countrymen, by forcing them to have recourse to the workhouse ...
-the farmer, while increasing his own gains, has prevented any accumulation on the
-part of his labouring dependents.”45
-The part played in our days by the direct robbery from the labourer’s necessary consumption fund
-in the formation of surplus-value, and, therefore, of the accumulation fund of capital, the so-
-called domestic industry has served to show. (Ch. xv., sect. 8, c.) Further facts on this subject will
-be given later.
-Although in all branches of industry that part of the constant capital consisting of instruments of
-labour must be sufficient for a certain number of labourers (determined by the magnitude of the
-undertaking), it by no means always necessarily increases in the same proportion as the quantity
-421 Chapter 24
-of labour employed. In a factory, suppose that 100 labourers working 8 hours a day yield 800
-working-hours. If the capitalist wishes to raise this sum by one half, he can employ 50 more
-workers; but then he must also advance more capital, not merely for wages, but for instruments of
-labour. But he might also let the 100 labourers work 12 hours instead of 8, and then the
-instruments of labour already to hand would be enough. These would then simply be more rapidly
-consumed. Thus additional labour, begotten of the greater tension of labour-power, can augment
-surplus-product and surplus-value (i.e., the subject-matter of accumulation), without
-corresponding augmentation in the constant part of capital.
-In the extractive industries, mines, &c., the raw materials form no part of the capital advanced.
-The subject of labour is in this case not a product of previous labour, but is furnished by Nature
-gratis, as in the case of metals, minerals, coal, stone, &c. In these cases the constant capital
-consists almost exclusively of instruments of labour, which can very well absorb an increased
-quantity of labour (day and night shifts of labourers, e.g.). All other things being equal, the mass
-and value of the product will rise in direct proportion to the labour expended. As on the first day
-of production, the original produce-formers, now turned into the creators of the material elements
-of capital – man and Nature – still work together. Thanks to the elasticity of labour-power, the
-domain of accumulation has extended without any previous enlargement of constant capital.
-In agriculture the land under cultivation cannot be increased without the advance of more seed
-and manure. But this advance once made, the purely mechanical working of the soil itself
-produces a marvellous effect on the amount of the product. A greater quantity of labour, done by
-the same number of labourers as before, thus increases the fertility, without requiring any new
-advance in the instruments of labour. It is once again the direct action of man on Nature which
-becomes an immediate source of greater accumulation, without the intervention of any new
-capital.
-Finally, in what is called manufacturing industry, every additional expenditure of labour
-presupposes a corresponding additional expenditure of raw materials, but not necessarily of
-instruments of labour. And as extractive industry and agriculture supply manufacturing industry
-with its raw materials and those of its instruments of labour, the additional product the former
-have created without additional advance of capital, tells also in favour of the latter.
-General result: by incorporating with itself the two primary creators of wealth, labour-power and
-the land, capital acquires a power of expansion that permits it to augment the elements of its
-accumulation beyond the limits apparently fixed by its own magnitude, or by the value and the
-mass of the means of production, already produced, in which it has its being.
-Another important factor in the accumulation of capital is the degree of productivity of social
-labour.
-With the productive power of labour increases the mass of the products, in which a certain value,
-and, therefore, a surplus-value of a given magnitude, is embodied. The rate of surplus-value
-remaining the same or even falling, so long as it only falls more slowly, than the productive
-power of labour rises, the mass of the surplus-product increases. The division of this product into
-revenue and additional capital remaining the same, the consumption of the capitalist may,
-therefore, increase without any decrease in the fund of accumulation. The relative magnitude of
-the accumulation fund may even increase at the expense of the consumption fund, whilst the
-cheapening of commodities places at the disposal of the capitalist as many means of enjoyment as
-formerly, or even more than formerly. But hand-in-hand with the increasing productivity of
-labour, goes, as we have seen, the cheapening of the labourer, therefore a higher rate of surplus-
-value, even when the real wages are rising. The latter never rise proportionally to the productive
-power of labour. The same value in variable capital therefore sets in movement more labour-
-422 Chapter 24
-power, and, therefore, more labour. The same value in constant capital is embodied in more
-means of production, i.e., in more instruments of labour, materials of labour and auxiliary
-materials; it therefore also supplies more elements for the production both of use value and of
-value, and with these more absorbers of labour. The value of the additional capital, therefore,
-remaining the same or even diminishing, accelerated accumulation still takes place. Not only does
-the scale of reproduction materially extend, but the production of surplus-value increases more
-rapidly than the value of the additional capital.
-The development of the productive power of labour reacts also on the original capital already
-engaged in the process of production. A part of the functioning constant capital consists of
-instruments of labour, such as machinery, &c., which are not consumed, and therefore not
-reproduced, or replaced by new ones of the same kind, until after long periods of time. But every
-year a part of these instruments of labour perishes or reaches the limit of its productive function.
-It reaches, therefore, in that year, the time for its periodical reproduction, for its replacement by
-new ones of the same kind. If the productiveness of labour has, during the using up of these
-instruments of labour, increased (and it develops continually with the uninterrupted advance of
-science and technology), more efficient and (considering their increased efficiency), cheaper
-machines, tools, apparatus, &c., replace the old. The old capital is reproduced in a more
-productive form, apart from the constant detail improvements in the instruments of labour already
-in use. The other part of the constant capital, raw material and auxiliary substances, is constantly
-reproduced in less than a year; those produced by agriculture, for the most part annually. Every
-introduction of improved methods, therefore, works almost simultaneously on the new capital and
-on that already in action. Every advance in Chemistry not only multiplies the number of useful
-materials and the useful applications of those already known, thus extending with the growth of
-capital its sphere of investment. It teaches at the same time how to throw the excrements of the
-processes of production and consumption back again into the circle of the process of
-reproduction, and thus, without any previous outlay of capital, creates new matter for capital.
-Like the increased exploitation of natural wealth by the mere increase in the tension of labour-
-power, science and technology give capital a power of expansion independent of the given
-magnitude of the capital actually functioning. They react at the same time on that part of the
-original capital which has entered upon its stage of renewal. This, in passing into its new shape,
-incorporates gratis the social advance made while its old shape was being used up. Of course, this
-development of productive power is accompanied by a partial depreciation of functioning capital.
-So far as this depreciation makes itself acutely felt in competition, the burden falls on the
-labourer, in the increased exploitation of whom the capitalist looks for his indemnification.
-Labour transmits to its product the value of the means of production consumed by it. On the other
-hand, the value and mass of the means of production set in motion by a given quantity of labour
-increase as the labour becomes more productive. Though the same quantity of labour adds always
-to its products only the same sum of new value, still the old capital value, transmitted by the
-labour to the products, increases with the growing productivity of labour.
-An English and a Chinese spinner, e.g., may work the same number of hours with the same
-intensity; then they will both in a week create equal values. But in spite of this equality, an
-immense difference will obtain between the value of the week’s product of the Englishman, who
-works with a mighty automaton, and that of the Chinaman, who has but a spinning-wheel. In the
-same time as the Chinaman spins one pound of cotton, the Englishman spins several hundreds of
-pounds. A sum, many hundred times as great, of old values swells the value of his product, in
-which those re-appear in a new, useful form, and can thus function anew as capital.
-423 Chapter 24
-“In 1782,” as Frederick Engels teaches us, “all the wool crop in England of the
-three preceding years, lay untouched for want of labourers, and so it must have
-lain, if newly invented machinery had not come to its aid and spun it.”46
-Labour embodied in the form of machinery of course did not directly force into life a single man,
-but it made it possible for a smaller number of labourers, with the addition of relatively less living
-labour, not only to consume the wool productively, and put into it new value, but to preserve in
-the form of yarn, &c., its old value. At the same time, it caused and stimulated increased
-reproduction of wool. It is the natural property of living labour, to transmit old value, whilst it
-creates new. Hence, with the increase in efficacy, extent and value of its means of production,
-consequently with the accumulation that accompanies the development of its productive power,
-labour keeps up and eternises an always increasing capital value in a form ever new.”47 This
-natural power of labour takes the appearance of an intrinsic property of capital, in which it is
-incorporated, just as the productive forces of social labour take the appearance of inherent
-properties of capital, and as the constant appropriation of surplus labour by the capitalists, takes
-that of a constant self-expansion of capital.
-With the increase of capital, the difference between the capital employed and the capital
-consumed increases. In other words, there is increase in the value and the material mass of the
-instruments of labour, such as buildings, machinery, drain-pipes, working-cattle, apparatus of
-every kind that function for a longer or shorter time in processes of production constantly
-repeated, or that serve for the attainment of particular useful effects, whilst they themselves only
-gradually wear out, therefore only lose their value piecemeal, therefore transfer that value to the
-product only bit by bit. In the same proportion as these instruments of labour serve as product-
-formers without adding value to the product, i.e., in the same proportion as they are wholly
-employed but only partly consumed, they perform, as we saw earlier, the same gratuitous service
-as the natural forces, water, steam, air, electricity, etc. This gratuitous service of past labour,
-when seized and filled with a soul by living labour, increases with the advancing stages of
-accumulation.
-Since past labour always disguises itself as capital, i.e., since the passive of the labour of A, B, C,
-etc., takes the form of the active of the non-labourer X, bourgeois and political economists are
-full of praises of the services of dead and gone labour, which, according to the Scotch genius
-MacCulloch, ought to receive a special remuneration in the shape of interest, profit, etc.48 The
-powerful and ever-increasing assistance given by past labour to the living labour process under
-the form of means of production is, therefore, attributed to that form of past labour in which it is
-alienated, as unpaid labour, from the worker himself, i.e., to its capitalistic form. The practical
-agents of capitalistic production and their pettifogging ideologists are as unable to think of the
-means of production as separate from the antagonistic social mask they wear today, as a slave-
-owner to think of the worker himself as distinct from his character as a slave.
-With a given degree of exploitation of labour-power, the mass of the surplus-value produced is
-determined by the number of workers simultaneously exploited; and this corresponds, although in
-varying proportions, with the magnitude of the capital. The more, therefore, capital increases by
-means of successive accumulations, the more does the sum of the value increase that is divided
-into consumption fund and accumulation fund. The capitalist can, therefore, live a more jolly life,
-and at the same time show more “abstinence.” And, finally, all the springs of production act with
-greater elasticity, the more its scale extends with the mass of the capital advanced.
-424 Chapter 24
-Section 5: The So-Called Labour Fund
-It has been shown in the course of this inquiry that capital is not a fixed magnitude, but is a part
-of social wealth, elastic and constantly fluctuating with the division of fresh surplus-value into
-revenue and additional capital. It has been seen further that, even with a given magnitude of
-functioning capital, the labour-power, the science, and the land (by which are to be understood,
-economically, all conditions of labour furnished by Nature independently of man), embodied in it,
-form elastic powers of capital, allowing it, within certain limits, a field of action independent of
-its own magnitude. In this inquiry we have neglected all effects of the process of circulation,
-effects which may produce very different degrees of efficiency in the same mass of capital. And
-as we presupposed the limits set by capitalist production, that is to say, presupposed the process
-of social production in a form developed by purely spontaneous growth, we neglected any more
-rational combination, directly and systematically practicable with the means of production, and
-the mass of labour-power at present disposable. Classical economy always loved to conceive
-social capital as a fixed magnitude of a fixed degree of efficiency. But this prejudice was first
-established as a dogma by the arch-Philistine, Jeremy Bentham, that insipid, pedantic, leather-
-tongued oracle of the ordinary bourgeois intelligence of the 19th century.49 Bentham is among
-philosophers what Martin Tupper is among poets. Both could only have been manufactured in
-England.50 In the light of his dogma the commonest phenomena of the process of production, as,
-e.g., its sudden expansions and contractions, nay, even accumulation itself, become perfectly
-inconceivable. 51The dogma was used by Bentham himself, as well as by Malthus, James Mill,
-MacCulloch, etc., for an apologetic purpose, and especially in order to represent one part of
-capital, namely, variable capital, or that part convertible into labour-power, as a fixed magnitude.
-The material of variable capital, i.e., the mass of the means of subsistence it represents for the
-labourer, or the so-called labour fund, was fabled as a separate part of social wealth, fixed by
-natural laws and unchangeable. To set in motion the part of social wealth which is to function as
-constant capital, or, to express it in a material form, as means of production, a definite mass of
-living labour is required. This mass is given technologically. But neither is the number of
-labourers required to render fluid this mass of labour-power given (it changes with the degree of
-exploitation of the individual labour-power), nor is the price of this labour-power given, but only
-its minimum limit, which is moreover very variable. The facts that lie at the bottom of this dogma
-are these: on the one hand, the labourer has no right to interfere in the division of social wealth
-into means of enjoyment for the non-labourer and means of production.52 On the other hand, only
-in favourable and exceptional cases, has he the power to enlarge the so-called labour fund at the
-expense of the “revenue” of the wealthy.
-What silly tautology results from the attempt to represent the capitalistic limits of the labour fund
-as its natural and social limits may be seen, e.g., in Professor Fawcett.53
-“The circulating capital of a country,” he says, “is its wage-fund. Hence, if we
-desire to calculate the average money wages received by each labourer, we have
-simply to divide the amount of this capital by the number of the labouring
-population.” 54
-That is to say, we first add together the individual wages actually paid, and then we affirm that
-the sum thus obtained, forms the total value of the “labour fund” determined and vouchsafed to us
-by God and Nature. Lastly, we divide the sum thus obtained by the number of labourers to find
-out again how much may come to each on the average. An uncommonly knowing dodge this. It
-did not prevent Mr. Fawcett saying in the same breath:
-425 Chapter 24
-“The aggregate wealth which is annually saved in England, is divided into two portions; one
-portion is employed as capital to maintain our industry, and the other portion is exported to
-foreign countries... Only a portion, and perhaps, not a large portion of the wealth which is
-annually saved in this country, is invested in our own industry.55
-The greater part of the yearly accruing surplus-product, embezzled, because abstracted without
-return of an equivalent, from the English labourer, is thus used as capital, not in England, but in
-foreign countries. But with the additional capital thus exported, a part of the “labour fund”
-invented by God and Bentham is also exported.56
-1 “Accumulation of capital; the employment of a portion of revenue as capital.” (Malthus:
-“Definitions, &c.,” ed. Cazenove, p. 11.) “Conversion of revenue into capital,” (Malthus: “Princ. of
-Pol. Econ “ 2nd Ed., Lond.. 1836, p. 320.)
-2 We here take no account of export trade, by means of which a nation can change articles of luxury
-either into means of production or means of subsistence, and vice versà. In order to examine the object
-of our investigation in its integrity, free from all disturbing subsidiary circumstances, we must treat the
-whole world as one nation, and assume that capitalist production is everywhere established and has
-possessed itself of every branch of industry.
-3 Sismondi’s analysis of accumulation suffers from the great defect, that he contents himself, to too
-great an extent, with the phrase “conversion of revenue into capital,” without fathoming the material
-conditions of this operation.
-4 “Le travail primitif auquel son capital a dû sa naissance.” [the original labour, to which his capital
-owed its origin] Sismondi, l. c., ed. Paris, t. I., p. 109.
-5 “Labour creates capital before capital employs labour.” E. G. Wakefield, “England and America,”
-Lond., 1833, Vol. II, p. 110.
-6 The property of the capitalist in the product of the labour of others “is a strict consequence of the law
-of appropriation, the fundamental principle of which was, on the contrary, the exclusive title of every
-labourer to the product of his own labour.” (Cherbuliez, “Richesse ou Pauvreté,” Paris, 1841, p. 58,
-where, however, the dialectical reversal is not properly developed.)
-7 The following passage (to p. 551 “laws of capitalist appropriation.”) has been added to the English
-text in conformity with the 4th German edition.
-8 We may well, therefore, feel astonished at the cleverness of Proudhon, who would abolish
-capitalistic property by enforcing the eternal laws of property that are based on commodity
-production!
-9 “Capital, viz., accumulated wealth employed with a view to profit.” (Malthus, l. c.) “Capital ...
-consists of wealth saved from revenue, and used with a view to profit.” (R. Jones: “An Introductory
-Lecture on Polit. Econ.,” Lond., 1833, p. 16.)
-10 “The possessors of surplus-produce or capital.” (“The Source and Remedy of the National
-Difficulties. A Letter to Lord John Russell.” Lond., 1821.)
-11 “Capital, with compound interest on every portion of capital saved, is so all engrossing that all the
-wealth in the world from which income is derived, has long ago become the interest on capital.”
-(London, Economist, 19th July, 1851.)
-12 “No political economist of the present day can by saving mean mere hoarding: and beyond this
-contracted and insufficient proceeding, no use of the term in reference to the national wealth can well
-be imagined, but that which must arise from a different application of what is saved, founded upon a
-real distinction between the different kinds of labour maintained by it.” (Malthus, l. c., pp. 38, 39.)
-426 Chapter 24
-13 Thus for instance, Balzac, who so thoroughly studied every shade of avarice, represents the old
-usurer Gobseck as in his second childhood when he begins to heap up a hoard of commodities.
-14 “Accumulation of stocks ... non-exchange ... over-production.” (Th. Corbet. l. c., p. 104.)
-15 In this sense Necker speaks of the “objets de faste et de somptuosité,” [things of pomp and luxury]
-of which “le temps a grossi l’accummulation,” [accumulation has grown with time] and which “les
-lois de propriété ont rassemblés dans une seule classe de la société.” [the laws of property have
-brought into the hands of one class of society alone] (Oeuvres de M. Necker, Paris and Lausanne,
-1789, t. ii., p. 291.)
-16 Ricardo, l.c., p. 163, note.
-17 In spite of his “Logic,” John St. Mill never detects even such faulty analysis as this when made by
-his predecessors, an analysis which, even from the bourgeois standpoint of the science, cries out for
-rectification. In every case he registers with the dogmatism of a disciple, the confusion of his master’s
-thoughts. So here: “The capital itself in the long run becomes entirely wages, and when replaced by
-the sale of produce becomes wages again.”
-18 In his description of the process of reproduction, and of accumulation, Adam Smith, in many ways,
-not only made no advance, but even lost considerable ground, compared with his predecessors,
-especially by the Physiocrats. Connected with the illusion mentioned in the text, is the really
-wonderful dogma, left by him as an inheritance to Political Economy, the dogma, that the price of
-commodities is made up of wages, profit (interest) and rent, i.e., of wages and surplus-value. Starting
-from this basis, Storch naïvely confesses, “Il est impossible de résoudre le prix nécessaire dans ses
-éléments les plus simples.” [... it is impossible to resolve the necessary price into its simplest
-elements] (Storch, l. c., Petersb. Edit., 1815, t. ii., p. 141, note.) A fine science of economy this, which
-declares it impossible to resolve the price of a commodity into its simplest elements! This point will
-be further investigated in the seventh part of Book iii.
-19 The reader will notice, that the word revenue is used in a double sense: first, to designate surplus-
-value so far as it is the fruit periodically yielded by capital; secondly, to designate the part of that fruit
-which is periodically consumed by the capitalist, or added to the fund that supplies his private
-consumption. I have retained this double meaning because it harmonises with the language of the
-English and French economists.
-20 Taking the usurer, that old-fashioned but ever renewed specimen of the capitalist for his text, Luther
-shows very aptly that the love of power is an element in the desire to get rich. “The heathen were able,
-by the light of reason, to conclude that a usurer is a double-dyed thief and murderer. We Christians,
-however, hold them in such honour, that we fairly worship them for the sake of their money....
-Whoever eats up, robs, and steals the nourishment of another, that man commits as great a murder (so
-far as in him lies) as he who starves a man or utterly undoes him. Such does a usurer, and sits the
-while safe on his stool, when he ought rather to be hanging on the gallows, and be eaten by as many
-ravens as he has stolen guilders, if only there were so much flesh on him, that so many ravens could
-stick their beaks in and share it. Meanwhile, we hang the small thieves.... Little thieves are put in the
-stocks, great thieves go flaunting in gold and silk.... Therefore is there, on this earth, no greater enemy
-of man (after the devil) than a gripe-money, and usurer, for he wants to be God over all men. Turks,
-soldiers, and tyrants are also bad men, yet must they let the people live, and Confess that they are bad,
-and enemies, and do, nay, must, now and then show pity to some. But a usurer and money-glutton,
-such a one would have the whole world perish of hunger and thirst, misery and want, so far as in him
-lies, so that he may have all to himself, and every one may receive from him as from a God, and be his
-serf for ever. To wear fine cloaks, golden chains, rings, to wipe his mouth, to be deemed and taken for
-a worthy, pious man .... Usury is a great huge monster, like a werewolf, who lays waste all, more than
-any Cacus, Gerion or Antus. And yet decks himself out, and would be thought pious, so that people
-427 Chapter 24
-may not see where the oxen have gone, that he drags backwards into his den. But Hercules shall hear
-the cry of the oxen and of his prisoners, and shall seek Cacus even in cliffs and among rocks, and shall
-set the oxen loose again from the villain. For Cacus means the villain that is a pious usurer, and steals,
-robs, eats everything. And will not own that he has done it, and thinks no one will find him out,
-because the oxen, drawn backwards into his den, make it seem, from their foot-prints, that they have
-been let out. So the usurer would deceive the world, as though he were of use and gave the world
-oxen, which he, however, rends, and eats all alone... And since we break on the wheel, and behead
-highwaymen, murderers and housebreakers, how much more ought we to break on the wheel and
-kill.... hunt down, curse and behead all usurers.” (Martin Luther, l. c.)
-21 See Goethe’s “Faust.”
-22 Dr. Aikin: “Description of the Country from 30 to 40 miles round Manchester.” Lond., 1795, p.
-182, sq.
-23 A. Smith, l. c., bk. iii., ch. iii.
-24 Even J. B. Say says: “Les épargnes des riches se font aux dépens des pauvres.” [the savings of the
-rich are made at the expense of the poor] “The Roman proletarian lived almost entirely at the expense
-of society.... It can almost be said that modern society lives at the expense of the proletarians, on what
-it keeps out of the remuneration of labour.” (Sismondi: “études, &c.,” t. i., p. 24.)
-25 Malthus, l. c., pp. 319, 320.
-26 “An Inquiry into those Principles Respecting the Nature of Demand, &c.,” p. 67.
-27 l. c., p. 59.
-28 (Senior, “Principes fondamentaux del’Écon. Pol.” trad. Arrivabene. Paris, 1836, p. 308.) This was
-rather too much for the adherents of the old classical school. “Mr. Senior has substituted for it” (the
-expression, labour and profit) “the expression labour and Abstinence. He who converts his revenue
-abstains from the enjoyment which its expenditure would afford him. It is not the capital, but the use
-of the capital productively, which is the cause of profits.” (John Cazenove, l. c., p. 130, Note.) John St.
-Mill, on the contrary, accepts on the one hand Ricardo’s theory of profit, and annexes on the other
-hand Senior’s “remuneration of abstinence.” He is as much at home in absurd contradictions, as he
-feels at sea in the Hegelian contradiction, the source of all dialectic. It has never occurred to the vulgar
-economist to make the simple reflexion, that every human action may be viewed, as “abstinence” from
-its opposite. Eating is abstinence from fasting, walking, abstinence from standing still, working,
-abstinence from idling, idling, abstinence from working, &c. These gentlemen would do well, to
-ponder, once in a while, over Spinoza’s: “Determinatio est Negatio.”
-29 Senior, l. c., p. 342.
-30 “No one ... will sow his wheat, for instance, and allow it to remain a twelve month in the ground, or
-leave his wine in a cellar for years, instead of consuming these things or their equivalent at once ...
-unless he expects to acquire additional value, &c.” (Scrope, “Polit. Econ.,” edit. by A. Potter, New
-York, 1841, pp. 133-134.)
-31 “La privation que s’impose le capitalisté, en prêtant [The deprivation the capitalist imposes on
-himself by lending ...] (this euphemism used, for the purpose of identifying, according to the approved
-method of vulgar economy, the labourer who is exploited, with the industrial capitalist who exploits,
-and to whom other capitalists lend money) ses instruments de production au travailleur, au lieu d’en
-consacrer la valeur à son propre usage, en la transforment en objets d’utilité ou d’agrément.” [his
-instruments of production to the worker, instead of devoting their value to his own consumption, by
-transforming them into objects of utility or pleasure] (G. de Molinari, l. c., p. 36.)
-32 “La conservation d’un capital exige ... un effort constant pour résister a la tentation de le
-consommer.” (Courcelle-Seneuil, l. c., p. 57.)
-428 Chapter 24
-33 “The particular classes of income which yield the most abundantly to the progress of national
-capital, change at different stages of their progress, and are, therefore, entirely different in nations
-occupying different positions in that progress.... Profits ... unimportant source of accumulation,
-compared with wages and rents, in the earlier stages of society.... When a considerable advance in the
-powers of national industry has actually taken place, profits rise into comparative importance as a
-source of accumulation.” (Richard Jones, “Textbook, &c.,” pp. 16, 21.)
-34 l. c., p. 36, sq.
-35 “Ricardo says: ‘In different stages of society the accumulation of capital or of the means of
-employing’ (i.e., exploiting) ‘labour is more or less rapid, and must in all cases depend on the
-productive powers of labour. The productive powers of labour are generally greatest where there is an
-abundance of fertile land.’ If, in the first sentence, the productive powers of labour mean the smallness
-of that aliquot part of any produce that goes to those whose manual labour produced it, the sentence is
-nearly identical, because the remaining aliquot part is the fund whence capital can, if the owner
-pleases, be accumulated. But then this does not generally happen, where there is most fertile land.”
-(“Observations on Certain Verbal Disputes, &c.” pp. 74, 75.)
-36 J. Stuart Mill: “Essays on Some Unsettled Questions of Political Economy,” Lond., 1844, p. 90.
-37 “An Essay on Trade and Commerce,” Lond., 1770, P. 44. The Times of December, 1866, and
-January, 1867, in like manner published certain outpourings of the heart of the English mine-owner, in
-which the happy lot of the Belgian miners was pictured, who asked and received no more than was
-strictly necessary for them to live for their “masters.” The Belgian labourers have to suffer much, but
-to figure in The Times as model labourers! In the beginning of February, 1867, came the answer: strike
-of the Belgian miners at Marchienne, put down by powder and lead.
-38 l. c., pp. 44, 46.
-39 The Northamptonshire manufacturer commits a pious fraud, pardonable in one whose heart is so
-full. He nominally compares the life of the English and French manufacturing labourer, but in the
-words just quoted he is painting, as he himself confesses in his confused way, the French agricultural
-labourers.
-40 l. c., pp. 70, 71. Note in the 3rd German edition: today, thanks to the competition on the world-
-market, established since then, we have advanced much further. “If China,” says Mr. Stapleton, M.P.,
-to his constituents, “should become a great manufacturing country, I do not see how the
-manufacturing population of Europe could sustain the contest without descending to the level of their
-competitors.” (Times, Sept. 3, 1873, p. 8.) The wished-for goal of English capital is no longer
-Continental wages but Chinese.
-41 Benjamin Thompson: “Essays, Political, Economical, and Philosophical, &c.,” 3 vols., Lond, 1796-
-1802, vol. i., p. 294. In his “The State of the Poor, or an History of the Labouring Classes in England,
-&c.,” Sir F. M. Eden strongly recommends the Rumfordian beggar-soup to workhouse overseers, and
-reproachfully warns the English labourers that “many poor people, particularly in Scotland, live, and
-that very comfortably, for months together, upon oat-meal and barley-meal, mixed with only water
-and salt.” (l. c., vol. i, book i., ch. 2, p. 503.) The same sort of hints in the 19th century. “The most
-wholesome mixtures of flour having been refused (by the English agricultural labourer)... in Scotland,
-where education is better, this prejudice is, probably, unknown.” (Charles H. Parry, M. D., “The
-Question of the Necessity of the Existing Corn Laws Considered.” London, 1816, p. 69.) This same
-Parry, however, complains that the English labourer is now (1815) in a much worse condition than in
-Eden’s time (1797.)
-42 From the reports of the last Parliamentary Commission on adulteration of means of subsistence, it
-will be seen that the adulteration even of medicines is the rule, not the exception in England. E.g., the
-examination of 34 specimens of opium, purchased of as many different chemists in London, showed
-429 Chapter 24
-that 31 were adulterated with poppy heads, wheat-flour, gum, clay, sand, &c. Several did not contain
-an atom of morphia.
-43 G. B. Newnham (barrister-at-law): “A Review of the Evidence before the Committee of the two
-Houses of Parliament on the Corn Laws.” Lond., 1815, p. 20, note.
-44 l. c., pp. 19, 20.
-45 C. H. Parry, l. c., pp. 77, 69. The landlords, on their side, not only “indemnified” themselves for the
-Anti-Jacobin War, which they waged in the name of England, but enriched themselves enormously.
-Their rents doubled, trebled, quadrupled, “and in one instance, increased sixfold in eighteen years.” (I.
-c., pp. 100, 101.)
-46 Friedrich Engels, “Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England,” p. 20.
-47 Classic economy has, on account of a deficient analysis of the labour process, and of the process of
-creating value, never properly grasped this weighty element of reproduction, as may be seen in
-Ricardo; he says, e.g., whatever the change in productive power, “a million men always produce in
-manufactures the same value.” This is accurate, if the extension and degree of intensity of their labour
-are given. But it does not prevent (this Ricardo overlooks in certain conclusions he draws) a million
-men with different powers of productivity in their labour, turning into products very different masses
-of the means of production, and therefore preserving in their products very different masses of value;
-in consequence of which the values of the products yielded may vary considerably. Ricardo has, it
-may be noted in passing, tried in vain to make clear to J. B. Say, by that very example, the difference
-between use value (which he here calls wealth or material riches) and exchange-value. Say answers:
-“Quant à la difficulté qu’élève Mr. Ricardo en disant que, par des procédés mieux entendus un million
-de personnes peuvent produire deux fois, trois fois autant de richesses, sans produire plus de valeurs,
-cette difficulté n’est pas une lorsque l’on considére, ainsi qu’on le doit, la production comme un
-échange dans lequel on donne les services productifs de son travail, de sa terre, et de ses capitaux,
-pour obtenir des produits. C’est par le moyen de ces services productifs, que nous acquérons tous les
-produits qui sont au monde. Or... nous sommes d’autant plus riches, nos services productifs ont
-d’autant plus de valeur qu’ils obtiennent dans l’échange appelé production une plus grande quantité de
-choses utiles.” [As for the difficulty raised by Ricardo when he says that, by using better methods of
-production, a million people can produce two or three times as much wealth, without producing any
-more value, this difficulty disappears when one bears in mind, as one should, that production is like an
-exchange in which a man contributes the productive services of his labour, his land, and his capital, in
-order to obtain products. It is by means of these productive services that we acquire all the products
-existing in the world. Therefore ... we are richer, our productive services have the more value, the
-greater the quantity of useful things they bring in through the exchange which is called production] (J.
-B. Say, “Lettres à M. Malthus,” Paris, 1820, pp. 168, 169.) The “difficulté” — it exists for him, not for
-Ricardo — that Say means to clear up is this: Why does not the exchange-value of the use values
-increase, when their quantity increases in consequence of increased productive power of labour?
-Answer: the difficulty is met by calling use value, exchange-value, if you please. Exchange-value is a
-thing that is connected one way or another with exchange. If therefore production is called an
-exchange of labour and means of production against the product, it is clear as day that you obtain
-more exchange-value in proportion as the production yields more use value. In other words, the more
-use values, e.g., stockings, a working day yields to the stocking-manufacturer, the richer is he in
-stockings. Suddenly, however, Say recollects that “with a greater quantity” of stockings their “price”
-(which of course has nothing to do with their exchange-value!) falls “parce que la concurrence les (les
-producteurs) oblige à donner les produits pour ce qu’ils leur coûtent... [because competition obliges
-them (the producers) to sell their products for what they cost to make] But whence does the profit
-come, if the capitalist sells the commodities at cost-price? Never mind! Say declares that, in
-consequence of increased productivity, every one now receives in return for a given equivalent two
-430 Chapter 24
-pairs of stockings instead of one as before. The result he arrives at, is precisely that proposition of
-Ricardo that he aimed at disproving. After this mighty effort of thought, he triumphantly apostrophises
-Malthus in the words: “Telle est, monsieur, la doctrine bien liée, sans laquelle il est impossible, je le
-déclare, d’expliquer les plus grandes difficultés de l’économie politique, et notamment, comment il se
-peut qu’une nation soit plus riche lorsque ses produits diminuent de valeur, quoique la richesse soit de
-la valeur.” [This, Sir, is the well-founded doctrine without which it is impossible, I say, to explain the
-greatest difficulties in political economy, and, in particular, to explain why it is that a nation can be
-richer when its products fall in value, even though wealth is value] (l. c., p. 170.) An English
-economist remarks upon the conjuring tricks of the same nature that appear in Say’s “Lettres”: “Those
-affected ways of talking make up in general that which M. Say is pleased to call his doctrine and
-which he earnestly urges Malthus to teach at Hertford, as it is already taught ‘dans plusieurs parties de
-l’Europe.’ He says, ‘Si vous trouvez une physionomie de paradoxe à toutes ces propositions, voyez les
-choses qu’elles expriment, et j’ose croire qu’elles vous paraîtront fort simples et fort raisonnables.’ [in
-numerous parts of Europe ... If all those propositions appear paradoxical to you, look at the things they
-express, and I venture to believe that they will then appear very simple and very rational] Doubtless,
-and in consequence of the same process, they will appear everything else, except original.” (“An
-Inquiry into those Principles Respecting the Nature of Demand, &c.,” pp. 116, 110.)
-48 MacCulloch took out a patent for “wages of past labour,” long before Senior did for “wages of
-abstinence.”
-49 Compare among others, Jeremy Bentham: “Théorie des Peines et des Récompenses,” traduct. d’Et.
-Dumont, 3ème édit. Paris, 1826, t. II, L. IV., ch. II.
-50 Bentham is a purely English phenomenon. Not even excepting our philosopher, Christian Wolff, in
-no time and in no country has the most homespun commonplace ever strutted about in so self-satisfied
-a way. The principle of utility was no discovery of Bentham. He simply reproduced in his dull way
-what Helvétius and other Frenchmen had said with esprit in the 18th century. To know what is useful
-for a dog, one must study dog-nature. This nature itself is not to be deduced from the principle of
-utility. Applying this to man, he that would criticise all human acts, movements, relations, etc., by the
-principle of utility, must first deal with human nature in general, and then with human nature as
-modified in each historical epoch. Bentham makes short work of it. With the driest naïveté he takes
-the modern shopkeeper, especially the English shopkeeper, as the normal man. Whatever is useful to
-this queer normal man, and to his world, is absolutely useful. This yard-measure, then, he applies to
-past, present, and future. The Christian religion, e.g., is “useful,” “because it forbids in the name of
-religion the same faults that the penal code condemns in the name of the law.” Artistic criticism is
-“harmful,” because it disturbs worthy people in their enjoyment of Martin Tupper, etc. With such
-rubbish has the brave fellow, with his motto, “nuila dies sine line!,” piled up mountains of books. Had
-I the courage of my friend, Heinrich Heine, I should call Mr. Jeremy a genius in the way of bourgeois
-stupidity.
-51 “Political economists are too apt to consider a certain quantity of capital and a certain number of
-labourers as productive instruments of uniform power, or operating with a certain uniform intensity....
-Those... who maintain ... that commodities are the sole agents of production ... prove that production
-could never be enlarged, for it requires as an indispensable condition to such an enlargement that food,
-raw materials, and tools should be previously augmented; which is in fact maintaining that no increase
-of production can take place without a previous increase, or, in other words, that an increase is
-impossible.” (S. Bailey: “Money and its Vicissitudes,” pp. 58 and 70.) Bailey criticises the dogma
-mainly from the point of view of the process of circulation.
-52 John Stuart Mill, in his “Principles of Political Economy,” says: “The really exhausting and the
-really repulsive labours instead of being better paid than others, are almost invariably paid the worst of
-all.... The more revolting the occupation, the more certain it is to receive the minimum of
-431 Chapter 24
-remuneration.... The hardships and the earnings, instead of being directly proportional, as in any just
-arrangements of society they would be, are generally in an inverse ratio to one another.” To avoid
-misunderstanding, let me say that although men like John Stuart Mill are to blame for the
-contradiction between their traditional economic dogmas and their modern tendencies, it would be
-very wrong to class them with the herd of vulgar economic apologists.
-53 H. Fawcett, Professor of Political Economy at Cambridge. “The Economic position of the British
-labourer.” London, 1865, p. 120.
-54 I must here remind the reader that the categories, “variable and constant capital,” were first used by
-me. Political Economy since the time of Adam Smith has confusedly mixed up the essential
-distinctions involved in these categories, with the mere formal differences, arising out of the process
-of circulation, of fixed and circulating capital. For further details on this point, see Book II., Part II.
-55 Fawcett, l. c., pp. 122, 123.
-56 It might be said that not only capital, but also labourers, in the shape of emigrants, are annually
-exported from England. In the text, however, there is no question of the peculium of the emigrants,
-who are in great part not labourers. The sons of farmers make up a great part of them. The additional
-capital annually transported abroad to be put out at interest is in much greater proportion to the annual
-accumulation than the yearly emigration is to the yearly increase of population.
-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
-433 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
-434 Chapter 25
-growing capital, and even by doing so must eternise their dependent relation on their own
-product, as personified in the capitalists. In reference to this relation of dependence, Sir F. M.
-Eden in his “The State of the Poor, an History of the Labouring Classes in England,” says,
-“the natural produce of our soil is certainly not fully adequate to our subsistence;
-we can neither be clothed, lodged nor fed but in consequence of some previous
-labour. A portion at least of the society must be indefatigably employed .... There
-are others who, though they ‘neither toil nor spin,’ can yet command the produce
-of industry, but who owe their exemption from labour solely to civilisation and
-order .... They are peculiarly the creatures of civil institutions,4 which have
-recognised that individuals may acquire property by various other means besides
-the exertion of labour.... Persons of independent fortune ... owe their superior
-advantages by no means to any superior abilities of their own, but almost entirely
-... to the industry of others. It is not the possession of land, or of money, but the
-command of labour which distinguishes the opulent from the labouring part of the
-community .... This [scheme approved by Eden] would give the people of
-property sufficient (but by no means too much) influence and authority over those
-who ... work for them; and it would place such labourers, not in an abject or
-servile condition, but in such a state of easy and liberal dependence as all who
-know human nature, and its history, will allow to be necessary for their own
-comfort.”5
-Sir F. M. Eden, it may be remarked in passing, is the only disciple of Adam Smith during the
-eighteenth century that produced any work of importance.6
-Under the conditions of accumulation supposed thus far, which conditions are those most
-favourable to the labourers, their relation of dependence upon capital takes on a form endurable
-or, as Eden says: “easy and liberal.” Instead of becoming more intensive with the growth of
-capital, this relation of dependence only becomes more extensive, i.e., the sphere of capital’s
-exploitation and rule merely extends with its own dimensions and the number of its subjects. A
-larger part of their own surplus-product, always increasing and continually transformed into
-additional capital, comes back to them in the shape of means of payment, so that they can extend
-the circle of their enjoyments; can make some additions to their consumption-fund of clothes,
-furniture, &c., and can lay by small reserve funds of money. But just as little as better clothing,
-food, and treatment, and a larger peculium, do away with the exploitation of the slave, so little do
-they set aside that of the wage worker. A rise in the price of labour, as a consequence of
-accumulation of capital, only means, in fact, that the length and weight of the golden chain the
-wage worker has already forged for himself, allow of a relaxation of the tension of it. In the
-controversies on this subject the chief fact has generally been overlooked, viz., the differentia
-specifica [defining characteristic] of capitalistic production. Labour power is sold today, not with
-a view of satisfying, by its service or by its product, the personal needs of the buyer. His aim is
-augmentation of his capital, production of commodities containing more labour than he pays for,
-containing therefore a portion of value that costs him nothing, and that is nevertheless realised
-when the commodities are sold. Production of surplus-value is the absolute law of this mode of
-production. Labour-power is only saleable so far as it preserves the means of production in their
-capacity of capital, reproduces its own value as capital, and yields in unpaid labour a source of
-additional capital.7 The conditions of its sale, whether more or less favourable to the labourer,
-include therefore the necessity of its constant re-selling, and the constantly extended reproduction
-of all wealth in the shape of capital. Wages, as we have seen, by their very nature, always imply
-the performance of a certain quantity of unpaid labour on the part of the labourer. Altogether,
-435 Chapter 25
-irrespective of the case of a rise of wages with a falling price of labour, &c., such an increase only
-means at best a quantitative diminution of the unpaid labour that the worker has to supply. This
-diminution can never reach the point at which it would threaten the system itself. Apart from
-violent conflicts as to the rate of wages (and Adam Smith has already shown that in such a
-conflict, taken on the whole, the master is always master), a rise in the price of labour resulting
-from accumulation of capital implies the following alternative:
-Either the price of labour keeps on rising, because its rise does not interfere with the progress of
-accumulation. In this there is nothing wonderful, for, says Adam Smith, “after these (profits) are
-diminished, stock may not only continue to increase, but to increase much faster than before.... A
-great stock, though with small profits, generally increases faster than a small stock with great
-profits.” (l. c., ii, p. 189.) In this case it is evident that a diminution in the unpaid labour in no way
-interferes with the extension of the domain of capital. – Or, on the other hand, accumulation
-slackens in consequence of the rise in the price of labour, because the stimulus of gain is blunted.
-The rate of accumulation lessens; but with its lessening, the primary cause of that lessening
-vanishes, i.e., the disproportion between capital and exploitable labour power. The mechanism of
-the process of capitalist production removes the very obstacles that it temporarily creates. The
-price of labour falls again to a level corresponding with the needs of the self-expansion of capital,
-whether the level be below, the same as, or above the one which was normal before the rise of
-wages took place. We see thus: In the first case, it is not the diminished rate either of the absolute,
-or of the proportional, increase in labour power, or labouring population, which causes capital to
-be in excess, but conversely the excess of capital that makes exploitable labour power
-insufficient. In the second case, it is not the increased rate either of the absolute, or of the
-proportional, increase in labour power, or labouring population, that makes capital insufficient;
-but, conversely, the relative diminution of capital that causes the exploitable labour power, or
-rather its price, to be in excess. It is these absolute movements of the accumulation of capital
-which are reflected as relative movements of the mass of exploitable labour power, and therefore
-seem produced by the latter’s own independent movement. To put it mathematically: the rate of
-accumulation is the independent, not the dependent, variable; the rate of wages, the dependent,
-not the independent, variable. Thus, when the industrial cycle is in the phase of crisis, a general
-fall in the price of commodities is expressed as a rise in the value of money, and, in the phase of
-prosperity, a general rise in the price of commodities, as a fall in the value of money. The so-
-called currency school concludes from this that with high prices too much, with low prices too
-little8 money is in circulation. Their ignorance and complete misunderstanding of facts9 are
-worthily paralleled by the economists, who interpret the above phenomena of accumulation by
-saying that there are now too few, now too many wage labourers.
-The law of capitalist production, that is at the bottom of the pretended “natural law of
-population,” reduces itself simply to this: The correlation between accumulation of capital and
-rate of wages is nothing else than the correlation between the unpaid labour transformed into
-capital, and the additional paid labour necessary for the setting in motion of this additional
-capital. It is therefore in no way a relation between two magnitudes, independent one of the other:
-on the one hand, the magnitude of the capital; on the other, the number of the labouring
-population; it is rather, at bottom, only the relation between the unpaid and the paid labour of the
-same labouring population. If the quantity of unpaid labour supplied by the working class, and
-accumulated by the capitalist class, increases so rapidly that its conversion into capital requires an
-extraordinary addition of paid labour, then wages rise, and, all other circumstances remaining
-equal, the unpaid labour diminishes in proportion. But as soon as this diminution touches the
-point at which the surplus labour that nourishes capital is no longer supplied in normal quantity, a
-436 Chapter 25
-reaction sets in: a smaller part of revenue is capitalised, accumulation lags, and the movement of
-rise in wages receives a check. The rise of wages therefore is confined within limits that not only
-leave intact the foundations of the capitalistic system, but also secure its reproduction on a
-progressive scale. The law of capitalistic accumulation, metamorphosed by economists into
-pretended law of Nature, in reality merely states that the very nature of accumulation excludes
-every diminution in the degree of exploitation of labour, and every rise in the price of labour,
-which could seriously imperil the continual reproduction, on an ever-enlarging scale, of the
-capitalistic relation. It cannot be otherwise in a mode of production in which the labourer exists to
-satisfy the needs of self-expansion of existing values, instead of, on the contrary, material wealth
-existing to satisfy the needs of development on the part of the labourer. As, in religion, man is
-governed by the products of his own brain, so in capitalistic production, he is governed by the
-products of his own hand.10
-Section 2: Relative Diminution of the Variable Part of Capital
-Simultaneously with the Progress of Accumulation and of
-the Concentration that Accompanies it
-According to the economists themselves, it is neither the actual extent of social wealth, nor the
-magnitude of the capital already functioning, that lead to a rise of wages, but only the constant
-growth of accumulation and the degree of rapidity of that growth. (Adam Smith, Book I., chapter
-8.) So far, we have only considered one special phase of this process, that in which the increase of
-capital occurs along with a constant technical composition of capital. But the process goes
-beyond this phase.
-Once given the general basis of the capitalistic system, then, in the course of accumulation, a
-point is reached at which the development of the productivity of social labour becomes the most
-powerful lever of accumulation.
-“The same cause,” says Adam Smith, “which raises the wages of labour, the
-increase of stock, tends to increase its productive powers, and to make a smaller
-quantity of labour produce a greater quantity of work.” 11
-Apart from natural conditions, such as fertility of the soil, &c., and from the skill of independent
-and isolated producers (shown rather qualitatively in the goodness than quantitatively in the mass
-of their products), the degree of productivity of labour, in a given society, is expressed in the
-relative extent of the means of production that one labourer, during a given time, with the same
-tension of labour power, turns into products. The mass of the means of production which he thus
-transforms, increases with the productiveness of his labour. But those means of production play a
-double part. The increase of some is a consequence, that of the others a condition of the
-increasing productivity of labour. E.g., with the division of labour in manufacture, and with the
-use of machinery, more raw material is worked up in the same time, and, therefore, a greater mass
-of raw material and auxiliary substances enter into the labour process. That is the consequence of
-the increasing productivity of labour. On the other hand, the mass of machinery, beasts of burden,
-mineral manures, drain-pipes, &c., is a condition of the increasing productivity of labour. So also
-is it with the means of production concentrated in buildings, furnaces, means of transport, &c.
-But whether condition or consequence, the growing extent of the means of production, as
-compared with the labour power incorporated with them, is an expression of the growing
-productiveness of labour. The increase of the latter appears, therefore, in the diminution of the
-mass of labour in proportion to the mass of means of production moved by it, or in the diminution
-of the subjective factor of the labour process as compared with the objective factor.
-437 Chapter 25
-This change in the technical composition of capital, this growth in the mass of means of
-production, as compared with the mass of the labour power that vivifies them, is reflected again
-in its value composition, by the increase of the constant constituent of capital at the expense of its
-variable constituent. There may be, e.g., originally 50 per cent. of a capital laid out in means of
-production, and 50 per cent. in labour power; later on, with the development of the productivity
-of labour, 80 per cent. in means of production, 20 per cent. in labour power, and so on. This law
-of the progressive increase in constant capital, in proportion to the variable, is confirmed at every
-step (as already shown) by the comparative analysis of the prices of commodities, whether we
-compare different economic epochs or different nations in the same epoch. The relative
-magnitude of the element of price, which represents the value of the means of production only, or
-the constant part of capital consumed, is in direct, the relative magnitude of the other element of
-price that pays labour (the variable part of capital) is in inverse proportion to the advance of
-accumulation.
-This diminution in the variable part of capital as compared with the constant, or the altered value-
-composition of the capital, however, only shows approximately the change in the composition of
-its material constituents. If, e.g., the capital-value employed today in spinning is 7/8 constant and
-1/8 variable, whilst at the beginning of the 18th century it was ½ constant and ½ variable, on the
-other hand, the mass of raw material, instruments of labour, &c., that a certain quantity of
-spinning labour consumes productively today, is many hundred times greater than at the
-beginning of the 18th century. The reason is simply that, with the increasing productivity of
-labour, not only does the mass of the means of production consumed by it increase, but their
-value compared with their mass diminishes. Their value therefore rises absolutely, but not in
-proportion to their mass. The increase of the difference between constant and variable capital, is,
-therefore, much less than that of the difference between the mass of the means of production into
-which the constant, and the mass of the labour power into which the variable, capital is converted.
-The former difference increases with the latter, but in a smaller degree.
-But, if the progress of accumulation lessens the relative magnitude of the variable part of capital,
-it by no means, in doing this, excludes the possibility of a rise in its absolute magnitude. Suppose
-that a capital-value at first is divided into 50 per cent. of constant and 50 per cent. of variable
-capital; later into 80 per cent. of constant and 20 per cent. of variable. If in the meantime the
-original capital, say £6,000, has increased to £18,000, its variable constituent has also increased.
-It was £3,000, it is now £3,600. But where as formerly an increase of capital by 20 per cent.
-would have sufficed to raise the demand for labour 20 per cent., now this latter rise requires a
-tripling of the original capital.
-In Part IV, it was shown, how the development of the productiveness of social labour presupposes
-co-operation on a large scale; how it is only upon this supposition that division and combination
-of labour can be organised, and the means of production economised by concentration on a vast
-scale; how instruments of labour which, from their very nature, are only fit for use in common,
-such as a system of machinery, can be called into being; how huge natural forces can be pressed
-into the service of production; and how the transformation can be effected of the process of
-production into a technological application of science. On the basis of the production of
-commodities, where the means of production are the property of private persons, and where the
-artisan therefore either produces commodities, isolated from and independent of others, or sells
-his labour power as a commodity, because he lacks the means for independent industry, co-
-operation on a large scale can realise itself only in the increase of individual capitals, only in
-proportion as the means of social production and the means of subsistence are transformed into
-the private property of capitalists. The basis of the production of commodities can admit of
-438 Chapter 25
-production on a large scale in the capitalistic form alone. A certain accumulation of capital, in the
-hands of individual producers of commodities, forms therefore the necessary preliminary of the
-specifically capitalistic mode of production. We had, therefore, to assume that this occurs during
-the transition from handicraft to capitalistic industry. It may be called primitive accumulation,
-because it is the historic basis, instead of the historic result of specifically capitalist production.
-How it itself originates, we need not here inquire as yet. It is enough that it forms the starting
-point. But all methods for raising the social productive power of labour that are developed on this
-basis, are at the same time methods for the increased production of surplus-value or surplus-
-product, which in its turn is the formative element of accumulation. They are, therefore, at the
-same time methods of the production of capital by capital, or methods of its accelerated
-accumulation. The continual re-transformation of surplus-value into capital now appears in the
-shape of the increasing magnitude of the capital that enters into the process of production. This in
-turn is the basis of an extended scale of production, of the methods for raising the productive
-power of labour that accompany it, and of accelerated production of surplus-value. If, therefore, a
-certain degree of accumulation of capital appears as a condition of the specifically capitalist mode
-of production, the latter causes conversely an accelerated accumulation of capital. With the
-accumulation of capital, therefore, the specifically capitalistic mode of production develops, and
-with the capitalist mode of production the accumulation of capital. Both these economic factors
-bring about, in the compound ratio of the impulses they reciprocally give one another, that change
-in the technical composition of capital by which the variable constituent becomes always smaller
-and smaller as compared with the constant.
-Every individual capital is a larger or smaller concentration of means of production, with a
-corresponding command over a larger or smaller labour-army. Every accumulation becomes the
-means of new accumulation. With the increasing mass of wealth which functions as capital,
-accumulation increases the concentration of that wealth in the hands of individual capitalists, and
-thereby widens the basis of production on a large scale and of the specific methods of capitalist
-production. The growth of social capital is effected by the growth of many individual capitals. All
-other circumstances remaining the same, individual capitals, and with them the concentration of
-the means of production, increase in such proportion as they form aliquot parts of the total social
-capital. At the same time portions of the original capitals disengage themselves and function as
-new independent capitals. Besides other causes, the division of property, within capitalist
-families, plays a great part in this. With the accumulation of capital, therefore, the number of
-capitalists grows to a greater or less extent. Two points characterise this kind of concentration
-which grows directly out of, or rather is identical with, accumulation. First: The increasing
-concentration of the social means of production in the hands of individual capitalists is, other
-things remaining equal, limited by the degree of increase of social wealth. Second: The part of
-social capital domiciled in each particular sphere of production is divided among many capitalists
-who face one another as independent commodity-producers competing with each other.
-Accumulation and the concentration accompanying it are, therefore, not only scattered over many
-points, but the increase of each functioning capital is thwarted by the formation of new and the
-sub-division of old capitals. Accumulation, therefore, presents itself on the one hand as increasing
-concentration of the means of production, and of the command over labour; on the other, as
-repulsion of many individual capitals one from another.
-This splitting-up of the total social capital into many individual capitals or the repulsion of its
-fractions one from another, is counteracted by their attraction. This last does not mean that simple
-concentration of the means of production and of the command over labour, which is identical
-with accumulation. It is concentration of capitals already formed, destruction of their individual
-439 Chapter 25
-independence, expropriation of capitalist by capitalist, transformation of many small into few
-large capitals. This process differs from the former in this, that it only presupposes a change in
-the distribution of capital already to hand, and functioning; its field of action is therefore not
-limited by the absolute growth of social wealth, by the absolute limits of accumulation. Capital
-grows in one place to a huge mass in a single hand, because it has in another place been lost by
-many. This is centralisation proper, as distinct from accumulation and concentration.
-The laws of this centralisation of capitals, or of the attraction of capital by capital, cannot be
-developed here. A brief hint at a few facts must suffice. The battle of competition is fought by
-cheapening of commodities. The cheapness of commodities demands, caeteris paribus, on the
-productiveness of labour, and this again on the scale of production. Therefore, the larger capitals
-beat the smaller. It will further be remembered that, with the development of the capitalist mode
-of production, there is an increase in the minimum amount of individual capital necessary to carry
-on a business under its normal conditions. The smaller capitals, therefore, crowd into spheres of
-production which Modern Industry has only sporadically or incompletely got hold of. Here
-competition rages in direct proportion to the number, and in inverse proportion to the magnitudes,
-of the antagonistic capitals. It always ends in the ruin of many small capitalists, whose capitals
-partly pass into the hands of their conquerors, partly vanish. Apart from this, with capitalist
-production an altogether new force comes into play – the credit system, which in its first stages
-furtively creeps in as the humble assistant of accumulation, drawing into the hands of individual
-or associated capitalists, by invisible threads, the money resources which lie scattered, over the
-surface of society, in larger or smaller amounts; but it soon becomes a new and terrible weapon in
-the battle of competition and is finally transformed into an enormous social mechanism for the
-centralisation of capitals.
-Commensurately with the development of capitalist production and accumulation there develop
-the two most powerful levers of centralisation – competition and credit. At the same time the
-progress of accumulation increases the material amenable to centralisation, i.e., the individual
-capitals, whilst the expansion of capitalist production creates, on the one hand, the social want,
-and, on the other, the technical means necessary for those immense industrial undertakings which
-require a previous centralisation of capital for their accomplishment. Today, therefore, the force
-of attraction, drawing together individual capitals, and the tendency to centralisation are stronger
-than ever before. But if the relative extension and energy of the movement towards centralisation
-is determined, in a certain degree, by the magnitude of capitalist wealth and superiority of
-economic mechanism already attained, progress in centralisation does not in any way depend
-upon a positive growth in the magnitude of social capital. And this is the specific difference
-between centralisation and concentration, the latter being only another name for reproduction on
-an extended scale. Centralisation may result from a mere change in the distribution of capitals
-already existing, from a simple alteration in the quantitative grouping of the component parts of
-social capital. Here capital can grow into powerful masses in a single hand because there it has
-been withdrawn from many individual hands. In any given branch of industry centralisation
-would reach its extreme limit if all the individual capitals invested in it were fused into a single
-capital.12 In a given society the limit would be reached only when the entire social capital was
-united in the hands of either a single capitalist or a single capitalist company.
-Centralisation completes the work of accumulation by enabling industrial capitalists to extend the
-scale of their operations. Whether this latter result is the consequence of accumulation or
-centralisation, whether centralisation is accomplished by the violent method of annexation –
-when certain capitals become such preponderant centres of attraction for others that they shatter
-the individual cohesion of the latter and then draw the separate fragments to themselves – or
-440 Chapter 25
-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
-441 Chapter 25
-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
-442 Chapter 25
-production; and in fact every special historic mode of production has its own special laws of
-population, historically valid within its limits and only in so far as man has not interfered with
-them.
-But if a surplus labouring population is a necessary product of accumulation or of the
-development of wealth on a capitalist basis, this surplus population becomes, conversely, the
-lever of capitalistic accumulation, nay, a condition of existence of the capitalist mode of
-production. It forms a disposable industrial reserve army, that belongs to capital quite as
-absolutely as if the latter had bred it at its own cost. Independently of the limits of the actual
-increase of population, it creates, for the changing needs of the self-expansion of capital, a mass
-of human material always ready for exploitation. With accumulation, and the development of the
-productiveness of labour that accompanies it, the power of sudden expansion of capital grows
-also; it grows, not merely because the elasticity of the capital already functioning increases, not
-merely because the absolute wealth of society expands, of which capital only forms an elastic
-part, not merely because credit, under every special stimulus, at once places an unusual part of
-this wealth at the disposal of production in the form of additional capital; it grows, also, because
-the technical conditions of the process of production themselves – machinery, means of transport,
-&c. – now admit of the rapidest transformation of masses of surplus-product into additional
-means of production. The mass of social wealth, overflowing with the advance of accumulation,
-and transformable into additional capital, thrusts itself frantically into old branches of production,
-whose market suddenly expands, or into newly formed branches, such as railways, &c., the need
-for which grows out of the development of the old ones. In all such cases, there must be the
-possibility of throwing great masses of men suddenly on the decisive points without injury to the
-scale of production in other spheres. Overpopulation supplies these masses. The course
-characteristic of modern industry, viz., a decennial cycle (interrupted by smaller oscillations), of
-periods of average activity, production at high pressure, crisis and stagnation, depends on the
-constant formation, the greater or less absorption, and the re-formation of the industrial reserve
-army or surplus population. In their turn, the varying phases of the industrial cycle recruit the
-surplus population, and become one of the most energetic agents of its reproduction. This peculiar
-course of modern industry, which occurs in no earlier period of human history, was also
-impossible in the childhood of capitalist production. The composition of capital changed but very
-slowly. With its accumulation, therefore, there kept pace, on the whole, a corresponding growth
-in the demand for labour. Slow as was the advance of accumulation compared with that of more
-modern times, it found a check in the natural limits of the exploitable labouring population, limits
-which could only be got rid of by forcible means to be mentioned later. The expansion by fits and
-starts of the scale of production is the preliminary to its equally sudden contraction; the latter
-again evokes the former, but the former is impossible without disposable human material, without
-an increase, in the number of labourers independently of the absolute growth of the population.
-This increase is effected by the simple process that constantly “sets free” a part of the labourers;
-by methods which lessen the number of labourers employed in proportion to the increased
-production. The whole form of the movement of modern industry depends, therefore, upon the
-constant transformation of a part of the labouring population into unemployed or half-employed
-hands. The superficiality of Political Economy shows itself in the fact that it looks upon the
-expansion and contraction of credit, which is a mere symptom of the periodic changes of the
-industrial cycle, as their cause. As the heavenly bodies, once thrown into a certain definite
-motion, always repeat this, so is it with social production as soon as it is once thrown into this
-movement of alternate expansion and contraction. Effects, in their turn, become causes, and the
-varying accidents of the whole process, which always reproduces its own conditions, take on the
-form of periodicity. When this periodicity is once consolidated, even Political Economy then sees
-443 Chapter 25
-that the production of a relative surplus population – i.e., surplus with regard to the average needs
-of the self-expansion of capital – is a necessary condition of modern industry.
-“Suppose,” says H. Merivale, formerly Professor of Political Economy at Oxford,
-subsequently employed in the English Colonial Office, “suppose that, on the
-occasion of some of these crises, the nation were to rouse itself to the effort of
-getting rid by emigration of some hundreds of thousands of superfluous arms,
-what would be the consequence? That, at the first returning demand for labour,
-there would be a deficiency. However rapid reproduction may be, it takes, at all
-events, the space of a generation to replace the loss of adult labour. Now, the
-profits of our manufacturers depend mainly on the power of making use of the
-prosperous moment when demand is brisk, and thus compensating themselves for
-the interval during which it is slack. This power is secured to them only by the
-command of machinery and of manual labour. They must have hands ready by
-them, they must be able to increase the activity of their operations when required,
-and to slacken it again, according to the state of the market, or they cannot
-possibly maintain that pre-eminence in the race of competition on which the
-wealth of the country is founded.”16
-Even Malthus recognises overpopulation as a necessity of modern industry, though, after his
-narrow fashion, he explains it by the absolute over-growth of the labouring population, not by
-their becoming relatively supernumerary. He says:
-“Prudential habits with regard to marriage, carried to a considerable extent among
-the labouring class of a country mainly depending upon manufactures and
-commerce, might injure it.... From the nature of a population, an increase of
-labourers cannot be brought into market in consequence of a particular demand till
-after the lapse of 16 or 18 years, and the conversion of revenue into capital, by
-saving, may take place much more rapidly: a country is always liable to an
-increase in the quantity of the funds for the maintenance of labour faster than the
-increase of population.” 17
-After Political Economy has thus demonstrated the constant production of a relative surplus
-population of labourers to be a necessity of capitalistic accumulation, she very aptly, in the guise
-of an old maid, puts in the mouth of her “beau ideal” of a capitalist the following words addressed
-to those supernumeraries thrown on the streets by their own creation of additional capital: –
-“We manufacturers do what we can for you, whilst we are increasing that capital
-on which you must subsist, and you must do the rest by accommodating your
-numbers to the means of subsistence.”18
-Capitalist production can by no means content itself with the quantity of disposable labour power
-which the natural increase of population yields. It requires for its free play an industrial reserve
-army independent of these natural limits.
-Up to this point it has been assumed that the increase or diminution of the variable capital
-corresponds rigidly with the increase or diminution of the number of labourers employed.
-The number of labourers commanded by capital may remain the same, or even fall, while the
-variable capital increases. This is the case if the individual labourer yields more labour, and
-therefore his wages increase, and this although the price of labour remains the same or even falls,
-only more slowly than the mass of labour rises. Increase of variable capital, in this case, becomes
-an index of more labour, but not of more labourers employed. It is the absolute interest of every
-capitalist to press a given quantity of labour out of a smaller, rather than a greater number of
-444 Chapter 25
-labourers, if the cost is about the same. In the latter case, the outlay of constant capital increases
-in proportion to the mass of labour set in action; in the former that increase is much smaller. The
-more extended the scale of production, the stronger this motive. Its force increases with the
-accumulation of capital.
-We have seen that the development of the capitalist mode of production and of the productive
-power of labour – at once the cause and effect of accumulation – enables the capitalist, with the
-same outlay of variable capital, to set in action more labour by greater exploitation (extensive or
-intensive) of each individual labour power. We have further seen that the capitalist buys with the
-same capital a greater mass of labour power, as he progressively replaces skilled labourers by less
-skilled, mature labour power by immature, male by female, that of adults by that of young
-persons or children.
-On the one hand, therefore, with the progress of accumulation, a larger variable capital sets more
-labour in action without enlisting more labourers; on the other, a variable capital of the same
-magnitude sets in action more labour with the same mass of labour power; and, finally, a greater
-number of inferior labour powers by displacement of higher.
-The production of a relative surplus population, or the setting free of labourers, goes on therefore
-yet more rapidly than the technical revolution of the process of production that accompanies, and
-is accelerated by, the advance of accumulation; and more rapidly than the corresponding
-diminution of the variable part of capital as compared with the constant. If the means of
-production, as they increase in extent and effective power, become to a less extent means of
-employment of labourers, this state of things is again modified by the fact that in proportion as
-the productiveness of labour increases, capital increases its supply of labour more quickly than its
-demand for labourers. The overwork of the employed part of the working class swells the ranks
-of the reserve, whilst conversely the greater pressure that the latter by its competition exerts on
-the former, forces these to submit to overwork and to subjugation under the dictates of capital.
-The condemnation of one part of the working class to enforced idleness by the overwork of the
-other part, and the converse, becomes a means of enriching the individual capitalists,19 and
-accelerates at the same time the production of the industrial reserve army on a scale
-corresponding with the advance of social accumulation. How important is this element in the
-formation of the relative surplus population, is shown by the example of England. Her technical
-means for saving labour are colossal. Nevertheless, if to-morrow morning labour generally were
-reduced to a rational amount, and proportioned to the different sections of the working class
-according to age and sex, the working population to hand would be absolutely insufficient for the
-carrying on of national production on its present scale. The great majority of the labourers now
-“unproductive” would have to be turned into “productive” ones.
-Taking them as a whole, the general movements of wages are exclusively regulated by the
-expansion and contraction of the industrial reserve army, and these again correspond to the
-periodic changes of the industrial cycle. They are, therefore, not determined by the variations of
-the absolute number of the working population, but by the varying proportions in which the
-working class is divided into active and reserve army, by the increase or diminution in the relative
-amount of the surplus population, by the extent to which it is now absorbed, now set free. For
-Modern Industry with its decennial cycles and periodic phases, which, moreover, as accumulation
-advances, are complicated by irregular oscillations following each other more and more quickly,
-that would indeed be a beautiful law, which pretends to make the action of capital dependent on
-the absolute variation of the population, instead of regulating the demand and supply of labour by
-the alternate expansion and contraction of capital, the labour-market now appearing relatively
-under-full, because capital is expanding, now again over-full, because it is contracting. Yet this is
-445 Chapter 25
-the dogma of the economists. According to them, wages rise in consequence of accumulation of
-capital. The higher wages stimulate the working population to more rapid multiplication, and this
-goes on until the labour-market becomes too full, and therefore capital, relatively to the supply of
-labour, becomes insufficient. Wages fall, and now we have the reverse of the medal. The working
-population is little by little decimated as the result of the fall in wages, so that capital is again in
-excess relatively to them, or, as others explain it, falling wages and the corresponding increase in
-the exploitation of the labourer again accelerates accumulation, whilst, at the same time, the
-lower wages hold the increase of the working class in check. Then comes again the time, when
-the supply of labour is less than the demand, wages rise, and so on. A beautiful mode of motion
-this for developed capitalist production! Before, in consequence of the rise of wages, any positive
-increase of the population really fit for work could occur, the time would have been passed again
-and again, during which the industrial campaign must have been carried through, the battle fought
-and won.
-Between 1849 and 1859, a rise of wages practically insignificant, though accompanied by falling
-prices of corn, took place in the English agricultural districts. In Wiltshire, e.g., the weekly wages
-rose from 7s. to 8s.; in Dorsetshire from 7s. or 8s., to 9s., &c. This was the result of an unusual
-exodus of the agricultural surplus population caused by the demands of war, the vast extension of
-railroads, factories, mines, &c. The lower the wages, the higher is the proportion in which ever so
-insignificant a rise of them expresses itself. If the weekly wage, e.g., is 20s. and it rises to 22s.,
-that is a rise of 10 per cent.; but if it is only 7s. and it rises to 9s., that is a rise of 28 4/7 per cent.,
-which sounds very fine. Everywhere the farmers were howling, and the London Economist, with
-reference to these starvation-wages, prattled quite seriously of “a general and substantial
-advance.”20 What did the farmers do now? Did they wait until, in consequence of this brilliant
-remuneration, the agricultural labourers had so increased and multiplied that their wages must fall
-again, as prescribed by the dogmatic economic brain? They introduced more machinery, and in a
-moment the labourers were redundant again in a proportion satisfactory even to the farmers.
-There was now “more capital” laid out in agriculture than before, and in a more productive form.
-With this the demand for labour fell, not only relatively, but absolutely.
-The above economic fiction confuses the laws that regulate the general movement of wages, or
-the ratio between the working class – i.e., the total labour power – and the total social capital,
-with the laws that distribute the working population over the different spheres of production. If,
-e.g., in consequence of favourable circumstances, accumulation in a particular sphere of
-production becomes especially active, and profits in it, being greater than the average profits,
-attract additional capital, of course the demand for labour rises and wages also rise. The higher
-wages draw a larger part of the working population into the more favoured sphere, until it is
-glutted with labour power, and wages at length fall again to their average level or below it, if the
-pressure is too great. Then, not only does the immigration of labourers into the branch of industry
-in question cease; it gives place to their emigration. Here the political economist thinks he sees
-the why and wherefore of an absolute increase of workers accompanying an increase of wages,
-and of a diminution of wages accompanying an absolute increase of labourers. But he sees really
-only the local oscillation of the labour-market in a particular sphere of production – he sees only
-the phenomena accompanying the distribution of the working population into the different
-spheres of outlay of capital, according to its varying needs.
-The industrial reserve army, during the periods of stagnation and average prosperity, weighs
-down the active labour-army; during the periods of over-production and paroxysm, it holds its
-pretensions in check. Relative surplus population is therefore the pivot upon which the law of
-446 Chapter 25
-demand and supply of labour works. It confines the field of action of this law within the limits
-absolutely convenient to the activity of exploitation and to the domination of capital.
-This is the place to return to one of the grand exploits of economic apologetics. It will be
-remembered that if through the introduction of new, or the extension of old, machinery, a portion
-of variable capital is transformed into constant, the economic apologist interprets this operation
-which “fixes” capital and by that very act sets labourers “free,” in exactly the opposite way,
-pretending that it sets free capital for the labourers. Only now can one fully understand the
-effrontery of these apologists. What are set free are not only the labourers immediately turned out
-by the machines, but also their future substitutes in the rising generation, and the additional
-contingent, that with the usual extension of trade on the old basis would be regularly absorbed.
-They are now all “set free,” and every new bit of capital looking out for employment can dispose
-of them. Whether it attracts them or others, the effect on the general labour demand will be nil, if
-this capital is just sufficient to take out of the market as many labourers as the machines threw
-upon it. If it employs a smaller number, that of the supernumeraries increases; if it employs a
-greater, the general demand for labour only increases to the extent of the excess of the employed
-over those “set free.” The impulse that additional capital, seeking an outlet, would otherwise have
-given to the general demand for labour, is therefore in every case neutralised to the extent of the
-labourers thrown out of employment by the machine. That is to say, the mechanism of capitalistic
-production so manages matters that the absolute increase of capital is accompanied by no
-corresponding rise in the general demand for labour. And this the apologist calls a compensation
-for the misery, the sufferings, the possible death of the displaced labourers during the transition
-period that banishes them into the industrial reserve army! The demand for labour is not identical
-with increase of capital, nor supply of labour with increase of the working class. It is not a case of
-two independent forces working on one another. Les dés sont pipés.
-Capital works on both sides at the same time. If its accumulation, on the one hand, increases the
-demand for labour, it increases on the other the supply of labourers by the “setting free” of them,
-whilst at the same time the pressure of the unemployed compels those that are employed to
-furnish more labour, and therefore makes the supply of labour, to a certain extent, independent of
-the supply of labourers. The action of the law of supply and demand of labour on this basis
-completes the despotism of capital. As soon, therefore, as the labourers learn the secret, how it
-comes to pass that in the same measure as they work more, as they produce more wealth for
-others, and as the productive power of their labour increases, so in the same measure even their
-function as a means of the self-expansion of capital becomes more and more precarious for them;
-as soon as they discover that the degree of intensity of the competition among themselves
-depends wholly on the pressure of the relative surplus population; as soon as, by Trades’ Unions,
-&c., they try to organise a regular co-operation between employed and unemployed in order to
-destroy or to weaken the ruinous effects of this natural law of capitalistic production on their
-class, so soon capital and its sycophant, Political Economy, cry out at the infringement of the
-“eternal” and so to say “sacred” law of supply and demand. Every combination of employed and
-unemployed disturbs the “harmonious” action of this law. But, on the other hand, as soon as (in
-the colonies, e.g.) adverse circumstances prevent the creation of an industrial reserve army and,
-with it, the absolute dependence of the working class upon the capitalist class, capital, along with
-its commonplace Sancho Panza, rebels against the “sacred” law of supply and demand, and tries
-to check its inconvenient action by forcible means and State interference.
-447 Chapter 25
-Section 4: Different Forms of the Relative surplus population.
-The General Law of Capitalistic Accumulation
-The relative surplus population exists in every possible form. Every labourer belongs to it during
-the time when he is only partially employed or wholly unemployed. Not taking into account the
-great periodically recurring forms that the changing phases of the industrial cycle impress on it,
-now an acute form during the crisis, then again a chronic form during dull times – it has always
-three forms, the floating, the latent, the stagnant.
-In the centres of modern industry – factories, manufactures, ironworks, mines, &c. – the labourers
-are sometimes repelled, sometimes attracted again in greater masses, the number of those
-employed increasing on the whole, although in a constantly decreasing proportion to the scale of
-production. Here the surplus population exists in the floating form.
-In the automatic factories, as in all the great workshops, where machinery enters as a factor, or
-where only the modern division of labour is carried out, large numbers of boys are employed up
-to the age of maturity. When this term is once reached, only a very small number continue to find
-employment in the same branches of industry, whilst the majority are regularly discharged. This
-majority forms an element of the floating surplus population, growing with the extension of those
-branches of industry. Part of them emigrates, following in fact capital that has emigrated. One
-consequence is that the female population grows more rapidly than the male, teste England. That
-the natural increase of the number of labourers does not satisfy the requirements of the
-accumulation of capital, and yet all the time is in excess of them, is a contradiction inherent to the
-movement of capital itself. It wants larger numbers of youthful labourers, a smaller number of
-adults. The contradiction is not more glaring than that other one that there is a complaint of the
-want of hands, while at the same time many thousands are out of work, because the division of
-labour chains them to a particular branch of industry.21
-The consumption of labour power by capital is, besides, so rapid that the labourer, half-way
-through his life, has already more or less completely lived himself out. He falls into the ranks of
-the supernumeraries, or is thrust down from a higher to a lower step in the scale. It is precisely
-among the work-people of modern industry that we meet with the shortest duration of life. Dr.
-Lee, Medical Officer of Health for Manchester, stated
-“that the average age at death of the Manchester ... upper middle class was 38
-years, while the average age at death of the labouring class was 17; while at
-Liverpool those figures were represented as 35 against 15. It thus appeared that
-the well-to-do classes had a lease of life which was more than double the value of
-that which fell to the lot of the less favoured citizens.”22
-In order to conform to these circumstances, the absolute increase of this section of the proletariat
-must take place under conditions that shall swell their numbers, although the individual elements
-are used up rapidly. Hence, rapid renewal of the generations of labourers (this law does not hold
-for the other classes of the population). This social need is met by early marriages, a necessary
-consequence of the conditions in which the labourers of modern industry live, and by the
-premium that the exploitation of children sets on their production.
-As soon as capitalist production takes possession of agriculture, and in proportion to the extent to
-which it does so, the demand for an agricultural labouring population falls absolutely, while the
-accumulation of the capital employed in agriculture advances, without this repulsion being, as in
-non-agricultural industries, compensated by a greater attraction. Part of the agricultural
-population is therefore constantly on the point of passing over into an urban or manufacturing
-448 Chapter 25
-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,
-449 Chapter 25
-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.
-450 Chapter 25
-“In the economy of a nation, advantages and evils always balance one another (il
-bene ed il male economico in una nazione sempre all, istessa misura): the
-abundance of wealth with some people, is always equal to the want of it with
-others (la copia dei beni in alcuni sempre eguale alia mancanza di essi in altri): the
-great riches of a small number are always accompanied by the absolute privation
-of the first necessaries of life for many others. The wealth of a nation corresponds
-with its population, and its misery corresponds with its wealth. Diligence in some
-compels idleness in others. The poor and idle are a necessary consequence of the
-rich and active,” &c.26
-In a thoroughly brutal way about 10 years after Ortes, the Church of England parson, Townsend,
-glorified misery as a necessary condition of wealth.
-“Legal constraint (to labour) is attended with too much trouble, violence, and
-noise, whereas hunger is not only a peaceable, silent, unremitted pressure, but as
-the most natural motive to industry and labour, it calls forth the most powerful
-exertions.”
-Everything therefore depends upon making hunger permanent among the working class, and for
-this, according to Townsend, the principle of population, especially active among the poor,
-provides.
-“It seems to be a law of Nature that the poor should be to a certain degree
-improvident” [i.e., so improvident as to be born without a silver spoon in the
-mouth], “that there may always be some to fulfil the most servile, the most sordid,
-and the most ignoble offices in the community. The stock of human happiness is
-thereby much increased, whilst the more delicate are not only relieved from
-drudgery ... but are left at liberty without interruption to pursue those callings
-which are suited to their various dispositions ... it” [the Poor Law] “tends to
-destroy the harmony and beauty, the symmetry and order of that system which
-God and Nature have established in the world.”27 If the Venetian monk found in
-the fatal destiny that makes misery eternal, the raison d’être of Christian charity,
-celibacy, monasteries and holy houses, the Protestant prebendary finds in it a
-pretext for condemning the laws in virtue of which the poor possessed a right to a
-miserable public relief.
-“The progress of social wealth,” says Storch, “begets this useful class of society ...
-which performs the most wearisome, the vilest, the most disgusting functions,
-which takes, in a word, on its shoulders all that is disagreeable and servile in life,
-and procures thus for other classes leisure, serenity of mind and conventional”
-[c’est bon!] “dignity of character.”28
-Storch asks himself in what then really consists the progress of this capitalistic civilisation with
-its misery and its degradation of the masses, as compared with barbarism. He finds but one
-answer: security!
-“Thanks to the advance of industry and science,” says Sismondi, “every labourer
-can produce every day much more than his consumption requires. But at the same
-time, whilst his labour produces wealth, that wealth would, were he called on to
-consume it himself, make him less fit for labour.” According to him, “men” [i.e.,
-non-workers] “would probably prefer to do without all artistic perfection, and all
-the enjoyments that manufacturers procure for us, if it were necessary that all
-should buy them by constant toil like that of the labourer.... Exertion today is
-451 Chapter 25
-separated from its recompense; it is not the same man that first works, and then
-reposes; but it is because the one works that the other rests.... The indefinite
-multiplication of the productive powers of labour can then only have for result the
-increase of luxury and enjoyment of the idle rich.” 29
-Finally Destutt de Tracy, the fish-blooded bourgeois doctrinaire, blurts out brutally:
-“In poor nations the people are comfortable, in rich nations they are generally
-poor.”30
-Section 5: Illustrations of the General Law of Capitalist
-Accumulation
-A. England from 1846-1866
-No period of modern society is so favourable for the study of capitalist accumulation as the
-period of the last 20 years. It is as if this period had found Fortunatus’ purse. But of all countries
-England again furnishes the classical example, because it holds the foremost place in the world-
-market, because capitalist production is here alone completely developed, and lastly, because the
-introduction of the Free-trade millennium since 1846 has cut off the last retreat of vulgar
-economy. The titanic advance of production – the latter half of the 20 years’ period again far
-surpassing the former – has been already pointed out sufficiently in Part IV.
-Although the absolute increase of the English population in the last half century was very great,
-the relative increase or rate of growth fell constantly, as the following table borrowed from the
-census shows.
-Annual increase per cent. of the population of England and Wales in decimal numbers:
-1811-1821 1.533 per cent.
-1821-1831 1.446 per cent.
-1831-1841 1.326 per cent.
-1841-1851 1.216 per cent.
-1851-1861 1.141 per cent.
-Let us now, on the other hand, consider the increase of wealth. Here the movement of profit, rent
-of land, &c., that come under the income tax, furnishes the surest basis. The increase of profits
-liable to income tax (farmers and some other categories not included) in Great Britain from 1853
-to 1864 amounted to 50.47% or 4.58% as the annual average,31 that of the population during the
-same period to about 12%. The augmentation of the rent of land subject to taxation (including
-houses, railways, mines, fisheries, &c.), amounted for 1853 to 1864 to 38% or 3 5/12% annually.
-Under this head the following categories show the greatest increase:
-Excess of annual income
-of 1864 over that of 1853
-Increase
-per year
-Houses 38.60% 3.50%
-Quarries 84.76% 7.70%
-Mines 68.85% 6.26%
-Ironworks 39.92% 3.63%
-Fisheries 57.37% 5.21%
-452 Chapter 25
-Gasworks 126.02% 11.45%
-Railways 83.29% 7.57%
-If we compare the years from 1853 to 1864 in three sets of four consecutive years each, the rate
-of augmentation of the income increases constantly.32 It is, e.g., for that arising from profits
-between 1853 to 1857, 1.73% yearly; 1857-1861, 2.74%, and for 1861-64, 9.30% yearly. The
-sum of the incomes of the United Kingdom that come under the income tax was in 1856,
-£307,068,898; in 1859, £328,127,416; in 1862, £351,745,241; in 1863, £359,142,897; in 1864,
-£362,462,279; in 1865, £385,530,020.33
-The accumulation of capital was attended at the same time by its concentration and centralisation.
-Although no official statistics of agriculture existed for England (they did for Ireland), they were
-voluntarily given in 10 counties. These statistics gave the result that from 1851 to 1861 the
-number of farms of less than 100 acres had fallen from 31,583 to 26,597, so that 5,016 had been
-thrown together into larger farms.34 From 1815 to 1825 no personal estate of more than
-£1,000,000 came under the succession duty; from 1825 to 1855, however, 8 did; and 4 from 1856
-to June, 1859, i.e., in 4½ years.35 The centralisation will, however, be best seen from a short
-analysis of the Income Tax Schedule D (profits, exclusive of farms, &c.), in the years 1864 and
-1865. I note beforehand that incomes from this source pay income tax on everything over £60.
-These incomes liable to taxation in England, Wales and Scotland, amounted in 1864 to
-£95,844,222, in 1865 to £105,435,579.36 The number of persons taxed were in 1864, 308,416, out
-of a population of 23,891,009; in 1865, 332,431 out of a population of 24,127,003. The following
-table shows the distribution of these incomes in the two years:
-Year ending
-April 5th, 1864.
-Year ending
-April 5th, 1865.
-Income from
-Profits
-Income from
-People
-Income from
-Profits
-Income from
-People
-Total Income £95,844,222 308,416 105,435,738 332,431
-of these 57,028,289 23,334 64,554,297 24,265
-of these 36,415,225 3,619 42,535,576 4,021
-of these 22,809,781 832 27,555,313 973
-of these 8,744,762 91 11,077,238 107
-In 1855 there were produced in the United Kingdom 61,453,079 tons of coal, of value
-£16,113,167; in 1864, 92,787,873 tons, of value £23,197,968; in 1855, 3,218,154 tons of pig-iron,
-of value £8,045,385; 1864, 4,767,951 tons, of value £11,919,877. In 1854 the length of the
-railroads worked in the United Kingdom was 8,054 miles, with a paid-up capital of £286,068,794;
-in 1864 the length was 12,789 miles, with capital paid up of £425,719,613. In 1854 the total sum
-of the exports and imports of the United Kingdom was £268,210,145; in 1865, £489,923,285. The
-following table shows the movement of the exports:
-1846 £58,842,377
-1849 63,596,052
-1856 115,826,948
-1860 135,842,817
-1865 165,862,402
-18663 188,917,563
-453 Chapter 25
-7
-After these few examples one understands the cry of triumph of the Registrar-General of the
-British people:
-“Rapidly as the population has increased, it has not kept pace with the progress of
-industry and wealth.”38
-Let us turn now to the direct agents of this industry, or the producers of this wealth, to the
-working class.
-“It is one of the most melancholy features in the social state of this country,” says
-Gladstone, “that while there was a decrease in the consuming powers of the
-people, and while there was an increase in the privations and distress of the
-labouring class and operatives, there was at the same time a constant accumulation
-of wealth in the upper classes, and a constant increase of capital.”39
-Thus spake this unctuous minister in the House of Commons of February 13th, 1843. On April
-16th, 1863, 20 years later, in the speech in which he introduced his Budget:
-“From 1842 to 1852 the taxable income of the country increased by 6 per cent....
-In the 8 years from 1853 to 1861 it had increased from the basis taken in 1853 by
-20 per cent.! The fact is so astonishing as to be almost incredible ... this
-intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power ... entirely confined to classes of
-property ... must be of indirect benefit to the labouring population, because it
-cheapens the commodities of general consumption. While the rich have been
-growing richer, the poor have been growing less poor. At any rate, whether the
-extremes of poverty are less, I do not presume to say.”40
-How lame an anti-climax! If the working class has remained “poor,” only “less poor” in
-proportion as it produces for the wealthy class “an intoxicating augmentation of wealth and
-power,” then it has remained relatively just as poor. If the extremes of poverty have not lessened,
-they have increased, because the extremes of wealth have. As to the cheapening of the means of
-subsistence, the official statistics, e.g., the accounts of the London Orphan Asylum, show an
-increase in price of 20% for the average of the three years 1860-1862, compared with 1851-1853.
-In the following three years, 1863-1865, there was a progressive rise in the price of meat, butter,
-milk, sugar, salt, coals, and a number of other necessary means of subsistence.41 Gladstone’s
-next Budget speech of April 7th, 1864, is a Pindaric dithyrambus on the advance of surplus-
-value-making and the happiness of the people “tempered by poverty.” He speaks of masses “on
-the border” of pauperism, of branches of trade in which “wages have not increased,” and finally
-sums up the happiness of the working class in the words:
-“human life is but, in nine cases out of ten, a struggle for existence.” 42
-Professor Fawcett, not bound like Gladstone by official considerations, declares roundly:
-“I do not, of course, deny that money wages have been augmented by this increase
-of capital (in the last ten years), but this apparent advantage is to a great extent
-lost, because many of the necessaries of life are becoming dearer” (he believes
-because of the fall in value of the precious metals)..."the rich grow rapidly richer,
-whilst there is no perceptible advance in the comfort enjoyed by the industrial
-classes.... They (the labourers) become almost the slaves of the tradesman, to
-whom they owe money.”43
-In the chapters on the “working day” and “machinery,” the reader has seen under what
-circumstances the British working class created an “intoxicating augmentation of wealth and
-454 Chapter 25
-power” for the propertied classes. There we were chiefly concerned with the social functioning of
-the labourer. But for a full elucidation of the law of accumulation, his condition outside the
-workshop must also be looked at, his condition as to food and dwelling. The limits of this book
-compel us to concern ourselves chiefly with the worst paid part of the industrial proletariat, and
-with the agricultural labourers, who together form the majority of the working class.
-But first, one word on official pauperism, or on that part of the working class which has forfeited
-its condition of existence (the sale of labour power), and vegetates upon public alms. The official
-list of paupers numbered in England44 851,369 persons; in 1856, 877,767; in 1865, 971,433. In
-consequence of the cotton famine, it grew in the years 1863 and 1864 to 1,079,382 and 1,014,978.
-The crisis of 1866, which fell most heavily on London, created in this centre of the world market,
-more populous than the kingdom of Scotland, an increase of pauperism for the year 1866 of
-19.5% compared with 1865, and of 24.4% compared with 1864, and a still greater increase for the
-first months of 1867 as compared with 1866. From the analysis of the statistics of pauperism, two
-points are to be taken. On the one hand, the fluctuation up and down of the number of paupers,
-reflects the periodic changes of the industrial cycle. On the other, the official statistics become
-more and more misleading as to the actual extent of pauperism in proportion as, with the
-accumulation of capital, the class-struggle, and, therefore, the class consciousness of the working
-men, develop. E.g., the barbarity in the treatment of the paupers, at which the English Press (The
-Times, Pall Mall Gazette, etc.) have cried out so loudly during the last two years, is of ancient
-date. F. Engels showed in 1844 exactly the same horrors, exactly the same transient canting
-outcries of “sensational literature.” But frightful increase of “deaths by starvation” in London
-during the last ten years proves beyond doubt the growing horror in which the working-people
-hold the slavery of the workhouse, that place of punishment for misery.45
-B. The Badly Paid Strata of the British Industrial Class
-During the cotton famine of 1862, Dr. Smith was charged by the Privy Council with an inquiry
-into the conditions of nourishment of the distressed operatives in Lancashire and Cheshire. His
-observations during many preceding years had led him to the conclusion that “to avert starvation
-diseases,” the daily food of an average woman ought to contain at least 3,900 grains of carbon
-with 180 grains of nitrogen; the daily food of an average man, at least 4,300 grains of carbon with
-200 grains of nitrogen; for women, about the same quantity of nutritive elements as are contained
-in 2 lbs. of good wheaten bread, for men 1/9 more; for the weekly average of adult men and
-women, at least 28,600 grains of carbon and 1,330 grains of nitrogen. His calculation was
-practically confirmed in a surprising manner by its agreement with the miserable quantity of
-nourishment to which want had forced down the consumption of the cotton operatives. This was,
-in December, 1862, 29,211 grains of carbon, and 1,295 grains of nitrogen weekly.
-In the year 1863, the Privy Council ordered an inquiry into the state of distress of the worst-
-nourished part of the English working class. Dr. Simon, medical officer to the Privy Council,
-chose for this work the above-mentioned Dr. Smith. His inquiry ranges on the one hand over the
-agricultural labourers, on the other, over silk-weavers, needlewomen, kid-glovers, stocking-
-weavers, glove-weavers, and shoemakers. The latter categories are, with the exception of the
-stocking-weavers, exclusively town-dwellers. It was made a rule in the inquiry to select in each
-category the most healthy families, and those comparatively in the best circumstances.
-As a general result it was found that
-“in only one of the examined classes of in-door operatives did the average
-nitrogen supply just exceed, while in another it nearly reached, the estimated
-standard of bare sufficiency [i.e., sufficient to avert starvation diseases], and that
-455 Chapter 25
-in two classes there was defect – in one, a very large defect – of both nitrogen and
-carbon. Moreover, as regards the examined families of the agricultural population,
-it appeared that more than a fifth were with less than the estimated sufficiency of
-carbonaceous food, that more than one-third were with less than the estimated
-sufficiency of nitrogenous food, and that in three counties (Berkshire,
-Oxfordshire, and Somersetshire), insufficiency of nitrogenous food was the
-average local diet.”46
-Among the agricultural labourers, those of England, the wealthiest part of the United Kingdom,
-were the worst fed.47 The insufficiency of food among the agricultural labourers, fell, as a rule,
-chiefly on the women and children, for “the man must eat to do his work.” Still greater penury
-ravaged the town-workers examined.
-“They are so ill fed that assuredly among them there must be many cases of severe
-and injurious privation.”48
-(“Privation” of the capitalist all this! i.e., “abstinence” from paying for the means of subsistence
-absolutely necessary for the mere vegetation of his “hands.”) 49
-The following table shows the conditions of nourishment of the above-named categories of purely
-town-dwelling work-people, as compared with the minimum assumed by Dr. Smith, and with the
-food-allowance of the cotton operatives during the time of their greatest distress:
-Both Sexes Average weekly
-carbon
-Average weekly
-nitrogen
-Five in-door
-occupations 28,876 grains 1,192 grains
-Unemployed Lancashire
-Operatives 28,211 grains 1,295 grains
-Minimum quantity to be
-allowed to the Lancashire
-Operatives, equal number
-of males and females
-28,600 grains 1,330 grains
-One half, or 60/125, of the industrial labour categories investigated, had absolutely no beer, 28%
-no milk. The weekly average of the liquid means of nourishment in the families varied from
-seven ounces in the needle-women to 24¾ ounces in the stocking-makers. The majority of those
-who did not obtain milk were needle-women in London. The quantity of bread-stuffs consumed
-weekly varied from 7¾ lbs. for the needle-women to 11½ lbs. for the shoemakers, and gave a
-total average of 9.9 lbs. per adult weekly. Sugar (treacle, etc.) varied from 4 ounces weekly for
-the kid-glovers to 11 ounces for the stocking-makers; and the total average per week for all
-categories was 8 ounces per adult weekly. Total weekly average of butter (fat, etc.) 5 ounces per
-adult. The weekly average of meat (bacon, etc.) varied from 7¼ ounces for the silk-weavers, to
-18¼ ounces for the kid-glovers; total average for the different categories 13.6 ounces. The weekly
-cost of food per adult, gave the following average figures; silk-weavers 2s. 2½d., needle-women
-2s. 7d., kid-glovers 2s. 9½d., shoemakers 2s 7¾d., stocking-weavers 2s. 6¼d. For the silk-
-weavers of Macclesfield the average was only 1s. 8½d. The worst categories were the needle-
-women, silk-weavers and kid-glovers.50 Of these facts, Dr. Simon in his General Health Report
-says:
-“That cases are innumerable in which defective diet is the cause or the aggravator
-of disease, can be affirmed by any one who is conversant with poor law medical
-456 Chapter 25
-practice, or with the wards and out-patient rooms of hospitals.... Yet in this point
-of view, there is, in my opinion, a very important sanitary context to be added. It
-must be remembered that privation of food is very reluctantly borne, and that as a
-rule great poorness of diet will only come when other privations have preceded it.
-Long before insufficiency of diet is a matter of hygienic concern, long before the
-physiologist would think of counting the grains of nitrogen and carbon which
-intervene between life and starvation, the household will have been utterly
-destitute of material comfort; clothing and fuel will have been even scantier than
-food – against inclemencies of weather there will have been no adequate
-protection – dwelling space will have been stinted to the degree in which
-overcrowding produces or increases disease; of household utensils and furniture
-there will have been scarcely any ‒ even cleanliness will have been found costly
-or difficult, and if there still be self-respectful endeavours to maintain it, every
-such endeavour will represent additional pangs of hunger. The home, too, will be
-where shelter can be cheapest bought; in quarters where commonly there is least
-fruit of sanitary supervision, least drainage, least scavenging, least suppression of
-public nuisances, least or worst water supply, and, if in town, least light and air.
-Such are the sanitary dangers to which poverty is almost certainly exposed, when
-it is poverty enough to imply scantiness of food. And while the sum of them is of
-terrible magnitude against life, the mere scantiness of food is in itself of very
-serious moment.... These are painful reflections, especially when it is remembered
-that the poverty to which they advert is not the deserved poverty of idleness. In all
-cases it is the poverty of working populations. Indeed, as regards the in-door
-operatives, the work which obtains the scanty pittance of food, is for the most part
-excessively prolonged. Yet evidently it is only in a qualified sense that the work
-can be deemed self-supporting.... And on a very large scale the nominal self-
-support can be only a circuit, longer or shorter, to pauperism.”51
-The intimate connexion between the pangs of hunger of the most industrious layers of the
-working class, and the extravagant consumption, coarse or refined, of the rich, for which
-capitalist accumulation is the basis, reveals itself only when the economic laws are known. It is
-otherwise with the “housing of the poor.” Every unprejudiced observer sees that the greater the
-centralisation of the means of production, the greater is the corresponding heaping together of the
-labourers, within a given space; that therefore the swifter capitalistic accumulation, the more
-miserable are the dwellings of the working-people. “Improvements” of towns, accompanying the
-increase of wealth, by the demolition of badly built quarters, the erection of palaces for banks,
-warehouses, &c., the widening of streets for business traffic, for the carriages of luxury, and for
-the introduction of tramways, &c., drive away the poor into even worse and more crowded hiding
-places. On the other hand, every one knows that the dearness of dwellings is in inverse ratio to
-their excellence, and that the mines of misery are exploited by house speculators with more profit
-or less cost than ever were the mines of Potosi. The antagonistic character of capitalist
-accumulation, and therefore of the capitalistic relations of property generally,52 is here so evident,
-that even the official English reports on this subject teem with heterodox onslaughts on “property
-and its rights.” With the development of industry, with the accumulation of capital, with the
-growth and “improvement” of towns, the evil makes such progress that the mere fear of
-contagious diseases which do not spare even “respectability,” brought into existence from 1847 to
-1864 no less than 10 Acts of Parliament on sanitation, and that the frightened bourgeois in some
-towns, as Liverpool, Glasgow, &c., took strenuous measures through their municipalities.
-Nevertheless Dr. Simon, in his report of 1865, says:
-457 Chapter 25
-“Speaking generally, it may be said that the evils are uncontrolled in England.”
-By order of the Privy Council, in 1864, an inquiry was made into the conditions of the housing of
-the agricultural labourers, in 1865 of the poorer classes in the towns. The results of the admirable
-work of Dr. Julian Hunter are to be found in the seventh (1865) and eighth (1866) reports on
-“Public Health.” To the agricultural labourers, I shall come later. On the condition of town
-dwellings, I quote, as preliminary, a general remark of Dr. Simon.
-“Although my official point of view,” he says, “is one exclusively physical,
-common humanity requires that the other aspect of this evil should not be ignored
-.... In its higher degrees it [i.e., over-crowding] almost necessarily involves such
-negation of all delicacy, such unclean confusion of bodies and bodily functions,
-such exposure of animal and sexual nakedness, as is rather bestial than human. To
-be subject to these influences is a degradation which must become deeper and
-deeper for those on whom it continues to work. To children who are born under its
-curse, it must often be a very baptism into infamy. And beyond all measure
-hopeless is the wish that persons thus circumstanced should ever in other respects
-aspire to that atmosphere of civilisation which has its essence in physical and
-moral cleanliness.”53
-London takes the first place in over-crowded habitations, absolutely unfit for human beings.
-“He feels clear,” says Dr. Hunter, “on two points; first, that there are about 20
-large colonies in London, of about 10,000 persons each, whose miserable
-condition exceeds almost anything he has seen elsewhere in England, and is
-almost entirely the result of their bad house accommodation; and second, that the
-crowded and dilapidated condition of the houses of these colonies is much worse
-than was the case 20 years ago.”54 “It is not too much to say that life in parts of
-London and Newcastle is infernal.”55
-Further, the better-off part of the working class, together with the small shopkeepers and other
-elements of the lower middle class, falls in London more and more under the curse of these vile
-conditions of dwelling, in proportion as “improvements,” and with them the demolition of old
-streets and houses, advance, as factories and the afflux of human beings grow in the metropolis,
-and finally as house rents rise with the ground-rents.
-“Rents have become so heavy that few labouring men can afford more than one
-room.”56
-There is almost no house-property in London that is not overburdened with a number of
-middlemen. For the price of land in London is always very high in comparison with its yearly
-revenue, and therefore every buyer speculates on getting rid of it again at a jury price (the
-expropriation valuation fixed by jurymen), or on pocketing an extraordinary increase of value
-arising from the neighbourhood of some large establishment. As a consequence of this there is a
-regular trade in the purchase of “fag-ends of leases.”
-“Gentlemen in this business may be fairly expected to do as they do – get all they
-can from the tenants while they have them, and leave as little as they can for their
-successors.”57
-The rents are weekly, and these gentlemen run no risk. In consequence of the making of railroads
-in the City,
-“the spectacle has lately been seen in the East of London of a number of families
-wandering about some Saturday night with their scanty worldly goods on their
-backs, without any resting place but the workhouse.”58
-458 Chapter 25
-The workhouses are already over-crowded, and the “improvements” already sanctioned by
-Parliament are only just begun. If labourers are driven away by the demolition of their old houses,
-they do not leave their old parish, or at most they settle down on its borders, as near as they can
-get to it.
-“They try, of course, to remain as near as possible to their workshops. The
-inhabitants do not go beyond the same or the next parish, parting their two-room
-tenements into single rooms, and crowding even those.... Even at an advanced
-rent, the people who are displaced will hardly be able to get an accommodation so
-good as the meagre one they have left.... Half the workmen ... of the Strand ...
-walked two miles to their work.”59
-This same Strand, a main thoroughfare which gives strangers an imposing idea of the wealth of
-London, may serve as an example of the packing together of human beings in that town. In one of
-its parishes, the Officer of Health reckoned 581 persons per acre, although half the width of the
-Thames was reckoned in. It will be self-understood that every sanitary measure, which, as has
-been the case hitherto in London, hunts the labourers from one quarter, by demolishing
-uninhabitable houses, serves only to crowd them together yet more closely in another.
-“Either,” says Dr. Hunter, “the whole proceeding will of necessity stop as an
-absurdity, or the public compassion (!) be effectually aroused to the obligation
-which may now be without exaggeration called national, of supplying cover to
-those who by reason of their having no capital, cannot provide it for themselves,
-though they can by periodical payments reward those who will provide it for
-them.” 60
-Admire this capitalistic justice! The owner of land, of houses, the businessman, when
-expropriated by “improvements” such as railroads, the building of new streets, &c., not only
-receives full indemnity. He must, according to law, human and divine, be comforted for his
-enforced “abstinence” over and above this by a thumping profit. The labourer, with his wife and
-child and chattels, is thrown out into the street, and – if he crowds in too large numbers towards
-quarters of the town where the vestries insist on decency, he is prosecuted in the name of
-sanitation!
-Except London, there was at the beginning of the 19th century no single town in England of
-100,000 inhabitants. Only five had more than 50,000. Now there are 28 towns with more than
-50,000 inhabitants.
-“The result of this change is not only that the class of town people is enormously
-increased, but the old close-packed little towns are now centres, built round on
-every side, open nowhere to air, and being no longer agreeable to the rich are
-abandoned by them for the pleasanter outskirts. The successors of these rich are
-occupying the larger houses at the rate of a family to each room [... and find
-accommodation for two or three lodgers ...] and a population, for which the
-houses were not intended and quite unfit, has been created, whose surroundings
-are truly degrading to the adults and ruinous to the children.”61
-The more rapidly capital accumulates in an industrial or commercial town, the more rapidly flows
-the stream of exploitable human material, the more miserable are the improvised dwellings of the
-labourers.
-Newcastle-on-Tyne, as the centre of a coal and iron district of growing productiveness, takes the
-next place after London in the housing inferno. Not less than 34,000 persons live there in single
-rooms. Because of their absolute danger to the community, houses in great numbers have lately
-459 Chapter 25
-been destroyed by the authorities in Newcastle and Gateshead. The building of new houses
-progresses very slowly, business very quickly. The town was, therefore, in 1865, more full than
-ever. Scarcely a room was to let. Dr. Embleton, of the Newcastle Fever Hospital, says:
-“There can be little doubt that the great cause of the continuance and spread of the
-typhus has been the over-crowding of human beings, and the uncleanliness of
-their dwellings. The rooms, in which labourers in many cases live, are situated in
-confined and unwholesome yards or courts, and for space, light, air, and
-cleanliness, are models of insufficiency and insalubrity, and a disgrace to any
-civilised community; in them men, women, and children lie at night huddled
-together: and as regards the men, the night-shift succeed the day-shift, and the
-day-shift the night-shift in unbroken series for some time together, the beds
-having scarcely time to cool; the whole house badly supplied with water and
-worse with privies; dirty, unventilated, and pestiferous.”62
-The price per week of such lodgings ranges from 8d. to 3s.
-“The town of Newcastle-on-Tyne,” says Dr. Hunter, “contains a sample of the
-finest tribe of our countrymen, often sunk by external circumstances of house and
-street into an almost savage degradation.”63
-As a result of the ebbing and flowing of capital and labour, the state of the dwellings of an
-industrial town may today be bearable, tomorrow hideous. Or the aedileship of the town may
-have pulled itself together for the removal of the most shocking abuses. Tomorrow, like a swarm
-of locusts, come crowding in masses of ragged Irishmen or decayed English agricultural
-labourers. They are stowed away in cellars and lofts, or the hitherto respectable labourer’s
-dwelling is transformed into a lodging house whose personnel changes as quickly as the billets in
-the 30 years’ war. Example: Bradford (Yorkshire). There the municipal philistine was just busied
-with urban improvements. Besides, there were still in Bradford, in 1861, 1,751 uninhabited
-houses. But now comes that revival of trade which the mildly liberal Mr. Forster, the negro’s
-friend, recently crowed over with so much grace. With the revival of trade came of course an
-overflow from the waves of the ever fluctuating “reserve army” or “relative surplus population.”
-The frightful cellar habitations and rooms registered in the list,64 which Dr. Hunter obtained from
-the agent of an Insurance Company, were for the most part inhabited by well-paid labourers.
-They declared that they would willingly pay for better dwellings if they were to be had.
-Meanwhile, they become degraded, they fall ill, one and all, whilst the mildly liberal Forster, M.
-P., sheds tears over the blessings of Free Trade, and the profits of the eminent men of Bradford
-who deal in worsted. In the Report of September, 1865, Dr. Bell, one of the poor law doctors of
-Bradford, ascribes the frightful mortality of fever-patients in his district to the nature of their
-dwellings.
-“In one small cellar measuring 1,500 cubic feet ... there are ten persons ....
-Vincent Street, Green Aire Place, and the Leys include 223 houses having 1,450
-inhabitants, 435 beds, and 36 privies.... The beds ‒ and in that term I include any
-roll of dirty old rags, or an armful of shavings ‒ have an average of 3.3 persons to
-each, many have 5 and 6 persons to each, and some people, I am told, are
-absolutely without beds; they sleep in their ordinary clothes, on the bare boards –
-young men and women, married and unmarried, all together. I need scarcely add
-that many of these dwellings are dark, damp, dirty, stinking holes, utterly unfit for
-human habitations; they are the centres from which disease and death are
-distributed amongst those in better circumstances, who have allowed them thus to
-fester in our midst.”65
-460 Chapter 25
-Bristol takes the third place after London in the misery of its dwellings.
-“Bristol, where the blankest poverty and domestic misery abound in the wealthiest
-town of Europe.” 66
-C. The Nomad Population
-We turn now to a class of people whose origin is agricultural, but whose occupation is in great
-part industrial. They are the light infantry of capital, thrown by it, according to its needs, now to
-this point, now to that. When they are not on the march, they “camp.” Nomad labour is used for
-various operations of building and draining, brick-making, lime-burning, railway-making, &c. A
-flying column of pestilence, it carries into the places in whose neighbourhood it pitches its camp,
-small-pox, typhus, cholera, scarlet fever, &c.67 In undertakings that involve much capital outlay,
-such as railways, &c., the contractor himself generally provides his army with wooden huts and
-the like, thus improvising villages without any sanitary provisions, outside the control of the local
-boards, very profitable to the contractor, who exploits the labourers in two-fold fashion – as
-soldiers of industry and as tenants. According as the wooden hut contains 1, 2, or 3 holes, its
-inhabitant, navvy, or whatever he may be, has to pay 1, 3, or 4 shillings weekly.68 One example
-will suffice. In September, 1864, Dr. Simon reports that the Chairman of the Nuisances Removal
-Committee of the parish of Sevenoaks sent the following denunciation to Sir George Grey, Home
-Secretary: –
-“Small-pox cases were rarely heard of in this parish until about twelve months
-ago. Shortly before that time, the works for a railway from Lewisham to
-Tunbridge were commenced here, and, in addition to the principal works being in
-the immediate neighbourhood of this town, here was also established the depôt for
-the whole of the works, so that a large number of persons was of necessity
-employed here. As cottage accommodation could not be obtained for them all,
-huts were built in several places along the line of the works by the contractor, Mr.
-Jay, for their especial occupation. These huts possessed no ventilation nor
-drainage, and, besides, were necessarily over-crowded, because each occupant had
-to accommodate lodgers, whatever the number in his own family might be,
-although there were only two rooms to each tenement. The consequences were,
-according to the medical report we received, that in the night-time these poor
-people were compelled to endure all the horror of suffocation to avoid the
-pestiferous smells arising from the filthy, stagnant water, and the privies close
-under their windows. Complaints were at length made to the Nuisances Removal
-Committee by a medical gentleman who had occasion to visit these huts, and he
-spoke of their condition as dwellings in the most severe terms, and he expressed
-his fears that some very serious consequences might ensue, unless some sanitary
-measures were adopted. About a year ago, Mr. Jay promised to appropriate a hut,
-to which persons in his employ, who were suffering from contagious diseases,
-might at once be removed. He repeated that promise on the 23rd July last, but
-although since the date of the last Promise there have been several cases of small-
-pox in his huts, and two deaths from the same disease, yet he has taken no steps
-whatever to carry out his promise. On the 9th September instant, Mr. Kelson,
-surgeon, reported to me further cases of small-pox in the same huts, and he
-described their condition as most disgraceful. I should add, for your (the Home
-Secretary’s) information that an isolated house, called the Pest-house, which is set
-apart for parishioners who might be suffering from infectious diseases, has been
-continually occupied by such patients for many months past, and is also now
-461 Chapter 25
-occupied; that in one family five children died from small-pox and fever; that
-from the 1st April to the 1st September this year, a period of five months, there
-have been no fewer than ten deaths from small-pox in the parish, four of them
-being in the huts already referred to; that it is impossible to ascertain the exact
-number of persons who have suffered from that disease although they are known
-to be many, from the fact of the families keeping it as private as possible.”69
-The labourers in coal and other mines belong to the best paid categories of the British proletariat.
-The price at which they buy their wages was shown on an earlier page.70 Here I merely cast a
-hurried glance over the conditions of their dwellings. As a rule, the exploiter of a mine, whether
-its owner or his tenant, builds a number of cottages for his hands. They receive cottages and coal
-for firing “for nothing” – i.e., these form part of their wages, paid in kind. Those who are not
-lodged in this way receive in compensation £4 per annum. The mining districts attract with
-rapidity a large population, made up of the miners themselves, and the artisans, shopkeepers, &c.,
-that group themselves around them. The ground-rents are high, as they are generally where
-population is dense. The master tries, therefore, to run up, within the smallest space possible at
-the mouth of the pit, just so many cottages as are necessary to pack together his hands and their
-families. If new mines are opened in the neighbourhood, or old ones are again set working, the
-pressure increases. In the construction of the cottages, only one point of view is of moment, the
-“abstinence” of the capitalist from all expenditure that is not absolutely unavoidable.
-“The lodging which is obtained by the pitman and other labourers connected with
-the collieries of Northumberland and Durham,” says Dr. Julian Hunter, “is
-perhaps, on the whole, the worst and the dearest of which any large specimens can
-be found in England, the similar parishes of Monmouthshire excepted.... The
-extreme badness is in the high number of men found in one room, in the smallness
-of the ground-plot on which a great number of houses are thrust, the want of
-water, the absence of privies, and the frequent placing of one house on the top of
-another, or distribution into flats, ... the lessee acts as if the whole colony were
-encamped, not resident.”71
-“In pursuance of my instructions,” says Dr. Stevens, “I visited most of the large
-colliery villages in the Durham Union.... With very few exceptions, the general
-statement that no means are taken to secure the health of the inhabitants would be
-true of all of them.... All colliers are bound ['bound,’ an expression which, like
-bondage, dates from the age of serfdom] to the colliery lessee or owner for twelve
-months.... If the colliers express discontent, or in any way annoy the ‘viewer,’ a
-mark of memorandum is made against their names, and, at the annual ‘binding,’
-such men are turned off... It appears to me that no part of the ‘truck system’ could
-be worse than what obtains in these densely-populated districts. The collier is
-bound to take as part of his hiring a house surrounded with pestiferous influences;
-he cannot help himself, and it appears doubtful whether anyone else can help him
-except his proprietor (he is, to all intents and purposes, a serf), and his proprietor
-first consults his balance-sheet, and the result is tolerably certain. The collier is
-also often supplied with water by the proprietor, which, whether it be good or bad,
-he has to pay for, or rather he suffers a deduction for from his wages.”72
-In conflict with “public opinion,” or even with the Officers of Health, capital makes no difficulty
-about “justifying” the conditions partly dangerous, partly degrading, to which it confines the
-working and domestic life of the labourer, on the ground that they are necessary for profit. It is
-the same thing when capital “abstains” from protective measures against dangerous machinery in
-462 Chapter 25
-the factory, from appliances for ventilation and for safety in mines, &c. It is the same here with
-the housing of the miners. Dr. Simon, medical officer of the Privy Council, in his official Report
-says:
-“In apology for the wretched household accommodation ... it is alleged that
-miners are commonly worked on lease; that the duration of the lessee’s interest
-(which in collieries is commonly for 21 years), is not so long that he should deem
-it worth his while to create good accommodation for his labourers, and for the
-tradespeople and others whom the work attracts; that even if he were disposed to
-act liberally in the matter, this disposition would commonly be defeated by his
-landlord’s tendency to fix on him, as ground-rent, an exorbitant additional charge
-for the privilege of having on the surface of the ground the decent and
-comfortable village which the labourers of the subterranean property ought to
-inhabit, and that prohibitory price (if not actual prohibition) equally excludes
-others who might desire to build. It would be foreign to the purpose of this report
-to enter upon any discussion of the merits of the above apology. Nor here is it
-even needful to consider where it would be that, if decent accommodation were
-provided, the cost ... would eventually fall – whether on landlord, or lessee, or
-labourer, or public. But in presence of such shameful facts as are vouched for in
-the annexed reports [those of Dr. Hunter, Dr. Stevens, &c.] a remedy may well be
-claimed.... Claims of landlordship are being so used as to do great public wrong.
-The landlord in his capacity of mine-owner invites an industrial colony to labour
-on his estate, and then in his capacity of surface-owner makes it impossible that
-the labourers whom he collects, should find proper lodging where they must live.
-The lessee [the capitalist exploiter] meanwhile has no pecuniary motive for
-resisting that division of the bargain; well knowing that if its latter conditions be
-exorbitant, the consequences fall, not on him, that his labourers on whom they fall
-have not education enough to know the value of their sanitary rights, that neither
-obscenest lodging nor foulest drinking water will be appreciable inducements
-towards a ‘strike.’”73
-D. Effect of Crises on the Best Paid Part of the working
-class
-Before I turn to the regular agricultural labourers, I may be allowed to show, by one
-example, how industrial revulsions affect even the best-paid, the aristocracy, of the
-working class. It will be remembered that the year 1857 brought one of the great crises
-with which the industrial cycle periodically ends. The next termination of the cycle was
-due in 1866. Already discounted in the regular factory districts by the cotton famine,
-which threw much capital from its wonted sphere into the great centres of the money-
-market, the crisis assumed, at this time, an especially financial character. Its outbreak in
-1866 was signalised by the failure of a gigantic London Bank, immediately followed by
-the collapse of countless swindling companies. One of the great London branches of
-industry involved in the catastrophe was iron shipbuilding. The magnates of this trade
-had not only over-produced beyond all measure during the overtrading time, but they
-had, besides, engaged in enormous contracts on the speculation that credit would be
-forthcoming to an equivalent extent. Now, a terrible reaction set in, that even at this hour
-463 Chapter 25
-(the end of March, 1867) continues in this and other London industries.74 To show the
-condition of the labourers, I quote the following from the circumstantial report of a
-correspondent of the Morning Star, who, at the end of 1866, and beginning of 1867,
-visited the chief centres of distress:
-“In the East End districts of Poplar, Millwall, Greenwich, Deptford, Limehouse
-and Canning Town, at least 15,000 workmen and their families were in a state of
-utter destitution, and 3,000 skilled mechanics were breaking stones in the
-workhouse yard (after distress of over half a year’s duration).... I had great
-difficulty in reaching the workhouse door, for a hungry crowd besieged it.... They
-were waiting for their tickets, but the time had not yet arrived for the distribution.
-The yard was a great square place with an open shed running all round it, and
-several large heaps of snow covered the paving-stones in the middle. In the
-middle, also, were little wicker-fenced spaces, like sheep pens, where in finer
-weather the men worked; but on the day of my visit the pens were so snowed up
-that nobody could sit in them. Men were busy, however, in the open shed breaking
-paving-stones into macadam. Each man had a big paving-stone for a seat, and he
-chipped away at the rime-covered granite with a big hammer until he had broken
-up, and think! five bushels of it, and then he had done his day’s work, and got his
-day’s pay – threepence and an allowance of food. In another part of the yard was a
-rickety little wooden house, and when we opened the door of it, we found it filled
-with men who were huddled together shoulder to shoulder for the warmth of one
-another’s bodies and breath. They were picking oakum and disputing the while as
-to which could work the longest on a given quantity of food – for endurance was
-the point of honour. Seven thousand ... in this one workhouse ... were recipients of
-relief ... many hundreds of them ... it appeared, were, six or eight months ago,
-earning the highest wages paid to artisans.... Their number would be more than
-doubled by the count of those who, having exhausted all their savings, still refuse
-to apply to the parish, because they have a little left to pawn. Leaving the
-workhouse, I took a walk through the streets, mostly of little one-storey houses,
-that abound in the neighbourhood of Poplar. My guide was a member of the
-Committee of the Unemployed.... My first call was on an ironworker who had
-been seven and twenty weeks out of employment. I found the man with his family
-sitting in a little back room. The room was not bare of furniture, and there was a
-fire in it. This was necessary to keep the naked feet of the young children from
-getting frost bitten, for it was a bitterly cold day. On a tray in front of the fire lay a
-quantity of oakum, which the wife and children were picking in return for their
-allowance from the parish. The man worked in the stone yard of the workhouse
-for a certain ration of food, and threepence per day. He had now come home to
-dinner quite hungry, as he told us with a melancholy smile, and his dinner
-consisted of a couple of slices of bread and dripping, and a cup of milkless tea....
-The next door at which we knocked was opened by a middle-aged woman, who,
-without saying a word, led us into a little back parlour, in which sat all her family,
-silent and fixedly staring at a rapidly dying fire. Such desolation, such
-hopelessness was about these people and their little room, as I should not care to
-witness again. ‘Nothing have they done, sir,’ said the woman, pointing to her
-boys, ‘for six and twenty weeks; and all our money gone – all the twenty pounds
-464 Chapter 25
-that me and father saved when times were better, thinking it would yield a little to
-keep us when we got past work. Look at it,’ she said, almost fiercely, bringing out
-a bank-book with all its well kept entries of money paid in, and money taken out,
-so that we could see how the little fortune had begun with the first five shilling
-deposit, and had grown by little and little to be twenty pounds, and how it had
-melted down again till the sum in hand got from pounds to shillings, and the last
-entry made the book as worthless as a blank sheet. This family received relief
-from the workhouse, and it furnished them with just one scanty meal per day....
-Our next visit was to an iron labourer’s wife, whose husband had worked in the
-yards. We found her ill from want of food, lying on a mattress in her clothes, and
-just covered with a strip of carpet, for all the bedding had been pawned. Two
-wretched children were tending her, themselves looking as much in need of
-nursing as their mother. Nineteen weeks of enforced idleness had brought them to
-this pass, and while the mother told the history of that bitter past, she moaned as if
-all her faith in a future that should atone for it were dead.... On getting outside a
-young fellow came running after us, and asked us to step inside his house and see
-if anything could be done for him. A young wife, two pretty children, a cluster of
-pawn-tickets, and a bare room were all he had to show.”
-On the after pains of the crisis of 1866, the following extract from a Tory newspaper. It must not
-be forgotten that the East-end of London, which is here dealt with, is not only the seat of the iron
-shipbuilding mentioned above, but also of a so-called “home-industry” always underpaid.
-“A frightful spectacle was to be seen yesterday in one part of the metropolis.
-Although the unemployed thousands of the East-end did not parade with their
-black flags en masse, the human torrent was imposing enough. Let us remember
-what these people suffer. They are dying of hunger. That is the simple and terrible
-fact. There are 40,000 of them.... In our presence, in one quarter of this wonderful
-metropolis, are packed – next door to the most enormous accumulation of wealth
-the world ever saw – cheek by jowl with this are 40,000 helpless, starving people.
-These thousands are now breaking in upon the other quarters; always half-
-starving, they cry their misery in our ears, they cry to Heaven, they tell us from
-their miserable dwellings, that it is impossible for them to find work, and useless
-for them to beg. The local ratepayers themselves are driven by the parochial
-charges to the verge of pauperism.” – (Standard, 5th April, 1867.)
-As it is the fashion amongst English capitalists to quote Belgium as the Paradise of the labourer
-because “freedom of labour,” or what is the same thing, “freedom of capital,” is there limited
-neither by the despotism of Trades’ Unions, nor by Factory Acts, a word or two on the
-“happiness” of the Belgian labourer. Assuredly no one was more thoroughly initiated in the
-mysteries of this happiness than the late M. Ducpétiaux, inspector-general of Belgian prisons and
-charitable institutions, and member of the central commission of Belgian statistics. Let us take his
-work: “Budgets économiques des classes ouvrières de la Belgique,” Bruxelles, 1855. Here we
-find among other matters, a normal Belgian labourer’s family, whose yearly income and
-expenditure he calculates on very exact data, and whose conditions of nourishment are then
-compared with those of the soldier, sailor, and prisoner. The family “consists of father, mother,
-and four children.” Of these 6 persons “four may be usefully employed the whole year through.”
-It is assumed that “there is no sick person nor one incapable of work, among them,” nor are there
-“expenses for religious, moral, and intellectual purposes, except a very small sum for church
-sittings,” nor “contributions to savings banks or benefit societies,” nor “expenses due to luxury or
-465 Chapter 25
-the result of improvidence.” The father and eldest son, however, allow themselves “the use of
-tobacco,” and on Sundays “go to the cabaret,” for which a whole 86 centimes a week are
-reckoned.
-“From a general compilation of wages allowed to the labourers in different trades,
-it follows that the highest average of daily wage is 1 franc 56c., for men, 89
-centimes for women, 56 centimes for boys, and 55 centimes for girls. Calculated
-at this rate, the resources of the family would amount, at the maximum, to 1,068
-francs a-year.... In the family ... taken as typical we have calculated all possible
-resources. But in ascribing wages to the mother of the family we raise the
-question of the direction of the household. How will its internal economy be cared
-for? Who will look after the young children? Who will get ready the meals, do the
-washing and mending? This is the dilemma incessantly presented to the
-labourers.”
-According to this the budget of the family is:
-The father 300 working days at fr. 1.56 fr. 468
-mother 300 working days at fr. 0.89 fr. 267
-boy 300 working days at fr. 0.56 fr. 168
-girl 300 working days at fr. 0.55 fr. 165
-Total fr. 1,068
-The annual expenditure of the family would cause a deficit upon the hypothesis that the labourer
-has the food of:
-The man-of-war’s man fr. 1,828 Deficit fr. 760
-The soldier fr. 1,473 Deficit fr. 405
-The prisoner fr. 1,112 Deficit fr. 44
-“We see that few labouring families can reach, we will not say the average of the
-sailor or soldier, but even that of the prisoner. The general average (of the cost of
-each prisoner in the different prisons during the period 1847-1849), has been 63
-centimes for all prisons. This figure, compared with that of the daily maintenance
-of the labourer, shows a difference of 13 centimes. It must be remarked further,
-that if in the prisons it is necessary to set down in the account the expenses of
-administration and surveillance, on the other hand, the prisoners have not to pay
-for their lodging; that the purchases they make at the canteens are not included in
-the expenses of maintenance, and that these expenses are greatly lowered in
-consequence of the large number of persons that make up the establishments, and
-of contracting for or buying wholesale, the food and other things that enter into
-their consumption.... How comes it, however, that a great number, we might say, a
-great majority, of labourers, live in a more economical way? It is ... by adopting
-expedients, the secret of which only the labourer knows; by reducing his daily
-rations; by substituting rye-bread for wheat; by eating less meat, or even none at
-all, and the same with butter and condiments; by contenting themselves with one
-or two rooms where the family is crammed together, where boys and girls sleep
-side by side, often on the same pallet; by economy of clothing, washing, decency;
-466 Chapter 25
-by giving up the Sunday diversions; by, in short, resigning themselves to the most
-painful privations. Once arrived at this extreme limit, the least rise in the price of
-food, stoppage of work, illness, increases the labourer’s distress and determines
-his complete ruin; debts accumulate, credit fails, the most necessary clothes and
-furniture are pawned, and finally, the family asks to be enrolled on the list of
-paupers.” (Ducpétiaux, l. c., pp. 151, 154, 155.)
-In fact, in this “Paradise of capitalists” there follows, on the smallest change in the price of the
-most essential means of subsistence, a change in the number of deaths and crimes! (See
-Manifesto of the Maatschappij: “De Vlamingen Vooruit!” Brussels, 1860, pp. 15, 16.) In all
-Belgium are 930,000 families, of whom, according to the official statistics, 90,000 are wealthy
-and on the list of voters = 450,000 persons; 390,000 families of the lower middle-class in towns
-and villages, the greater part of them constantly sinking into the proletariat, = 1,950,000 persons.
-Finally, 450,000 working class families = 2,250,000 persons, of whom the model ones enjoy the
-happiness depicted by Ducpétiaux. Of the 450,000 working class families, over 200,000 are on
-the pauper list.
-E. The British Agricultural Proletariat
-Nowhere does the antagonistic character of capitalistic production and accumulation assert itself
-more brutally than in the progress of English agriculture (including cattle-breeding) and the
-retrogression of the English agricultural labourer. Before I turn to his present situation, a rapid
-retrospect. Modern agriculture dates in England from the middle of the 18th century, although the
-revolution in landed property, from which the changed mode of production starts as a basis, has a
-much earlier date.
-If we take the statements of Arthur Young, a careful observer, though a superficial thinker, as to
-the agricultural labourer of 1771, the latter plays a very pitiable part compared with his
-predecessor of the end of the 14th century,
-“when the labourer ... could live in plenty, and accumulate wealth,” 75
-not to speak of the 15th century, “the golden age of the English labourer in town and country.”
-We need not, however, go back so far. In a very instructive work of the year 1777 we read:
-“The great farmer is nearly mounted to a level with him [the gentleman]; while
-the poor labourer is depressed almost to the earth. His unfortunate situation will
-fully appear, by taking a comparative view of it, only forty years ago, and at
-present.... Landlord and tenant ... have both gone hand in hand in keeping the
-labourer down.”76
-It is then proved in detail that the real agricultural wages between 1737 and 1777 fell nearly ¼ or
-25 per cent.
-“Modern policy,” says Dr. Richard Price also, “is, indeed, more favourable to the
-higher classes of people; and the consequences may in time prove that the whole
-kingdom will consist of only gentry and beggars, or of grandees and slaves.”77
-Nevertheless, the position of the English agricultural labourer from 1770 to 1780, with regard to
-his food and dwelling, as well as to his self-respect, amusements, &c., is an ideal never attained
-again since that time. His average wage expressed in pints of wheat was from 1770 to 1771, 90
-pints, in Eden’s time (1797) only 65, in 1808 but 60.78
-The state of the agricultural labourer at the end of the Anti-Jacobin War, during which landed
-proprietors, farmers, manufacturers, merchants, bankers, stockbrokers, army-contractors, &c.,
-enriched themselves so extraordinarily, has been already indicated above. The nominal wages
-467 Chapter 25
-rose in consequence partly of the bank-note depreciation, partly of a rise in the price of the
-primary means of subsistence independent of this depreciation. But the actual wage-variation can
-be evidenced in a very simple way, without entering into details that are here unnecessary. The
-Poor Law and its administration were in 1795 and 1814 the same. It will be remembered how this
-law was carried out in the country districts: in the form of alms the parish made up the nominal
-wage to the nominal sum required for the simple vegetation of the labourer. The ratio between the
-wages paid by the farmer, and the wage-deficit made good by the parish, shows us two things.
-First, the falling of wages below their minimum; second, the degree in which the agricultural
-labourer was a compound of wage labourer and pauper, or the degree in which he had been turned
-into a serf of his parish. Let us take one county that represents the average condition of things in
-all counties. In Northamptonshire, in 1795, the average weekly wage was 7s. 6d.; the total yearly
-expenditure of a family of 6 persons, £36 12s. 5d.; their total income, £29 18s.; deficit made good
-by the parish, £6 14s. 5d. In 1814, in the same county, the weekly wage was 12s. 2d.; the total
-yearly expenditure of a family of 5 persons, £54 18s. 4d.; their total income, £36, 2s.; deficit
-made good by the parish, £18 6s. 4d.79 In 1795 the deficit was less than 1/4 the wage, in 1814,
-more than half. It is self-evident that, under these circumstances, the meagre comforts that Eden
-still found in the cottage of the agricultural labourer, had vanished by 1814.80 Of all the animals
-kept by the farmer, the labourer, the instrumentum vocale, was, thenceforth, the most oppressed,
-the worst nourished, the most brutally treated.
-The same state of things went on quietly until
-“the Swing riots, in 1830, revealed to us (i.e., the ruling classes) by the light of
-blazing corn-stacks, that misery and black mutinous discontent smouldered quite
-as fiercely under the surface of agricultural as of manufacturing England.”81
-At this time, Sadler, in the House of Commons, christened the agricultural labourers “white
-slaves,” and a Bishop echoed the epithet in the Upper House. The most notable political
-economist of that period – E. G. Wakefield – says:
-“The peasant of the South of England ... is not a freeman, nor is he a slave; he is a
-pauper.”82
-The time just before the repeal of the Corn Laws threw new light on the condition of the
-agricultural labourers. On the one hand, it was to the interest of the middle-class agitators to
-prove how little the Corn Laws protected the actual producers of the corn. On the other hand, the
-industrial bourgeoisie foamed with sullen rage at the denunciations of the factory system by the
-landed aristocracy, at the pretended sympathy with the woes of the factory operatives, of those
-utterly corrupt, heartless, and genteel loafers, and at their “diplomatic zeal” for factory legislation.
-It is an old English proverb that “when thieves fall out, honest men come by their own,” and, in
-fact, the noisy, passionate quarrel between the two fractions of the ruling class about the question,
-which of the two exploited the labourers the more shamefully, was on each hand the midwife of
-the truth. Earl Shaftesbury, then Lord Ashley, was commander-in-chief in the aristocratic,
-philanthropic, anti-factory campaign. He was, therefore, in 1845, a favourite subject in the
-revelations of the Morning Chronicle on the condition of the agricultural labourers. This journal,
-then the most important Liberal organ, sent special commissioners into the agricultural districts,
-who did not content themselves with mere general descriptions and statistics, but published the
-names both of the labouring families examined and of their landlords. The following list gives the
-wages paid in three villages in the neighbourhood of Blanford, Wimbourne, and Poole. The
-villages are the property of Mr. G. Bankes and of the Earl of Shaftesbury. It will be noted that,
-just like Bankes, this “low church pope,” this head of English pietists, pockets a great part of the
-miserable wages of the labourers under the pretext of house-rent: –
-468 Chapter 25
-FIRST VILLAGE
-(a) Children. 2 3 2 2 6 3
-(b) Number of
-Members in Family.
-4 5 4 4 8 5
-(c) Weekly Wage of
-the Men.
-8s.
-0d.
-8s.
-0d.
-8s.
-0d.
-8s.
-0d.
-7s.
-0d.
-7s. 0d.
-(d) Weekly Wage of
-the Children.
-– – – – 1/-,
-1/6
-1/-, 2/-
-(e) Weekly Income of
-the whole Family.
-8s.
-0d.
-8s.
-0d.
-8s.
-0d.
-8s.
-0d.
-10s.
-6d.
-7s. 0d.
-(f) Weekly Rent. 2s.
-0d.
-1s.
-6d.
-1s.
-0d.
-1s.
-0d.
-2s.
-0d.
-1s. 4d.
-(g) Total Weekly
-wage after deduction
-of Rent.
-6s.
-0d.
-6s.
-6d.
-7s.
-0d.
-7s.
-0d.
-8s.
-6d.
-5s. 8d.
-(h) Weekly income
-per head.
-1s.
-6d.
-1s.
-3½d.
-1s.
-9d.
-1s.
-9d.
-1s. 0
-3/4d.
-1s.
-1½d.
-SECOND VILLAGE
-(a) Children. 6 6 8 4 3
-(b) Number of Members in
-Family.
-8 8 10 6 5
-(c) Weekly Wage of the
-Men.
-7s.
-0d.
-7s.
-0d.
-7s.
-0d.
-7s.
-0d.
-7s. 0d.
-(d) Weekly Wage of the
-Children.
-1/-,
-1/6
-1/-,
-1/6
-– – –
-(e) Weekly Income of the
-whole Family.
-10s.
-0d.
-7s.
-0d.
-7s.
-0d.
-7s.
-0d.
-7s. 0d.
-(f) Weekly Rent. 1s.
-6d.
-1s.
-3½d.
-1s.
-3½d.
-1s.
-6½d.
-1s. 6½d.
-(g) Total Weekly wage
-after deduction of Rent.
-8s.
-6d.
-5s.
-8½d.
-5s.
-8½d.
-5s.
-5½d.
-5s. 5½d.
-(h) Weekly income per
-head.
-1s. 0
-3/4d.
-0s.
-8½d.
-0s.
-7d.
-0s.
-11d.
-1s. 1d.
-469 Chapter 25
-THIRD VILLAGE
-(a) Children. 4 3 0
-(b) Number of Members in
-Family. 6 5 2
-(c) Weekly Wage of the Men. 7s. 0d. 7s. 0d. 5s. 0d.
-(d) Weekly Wage of the Children. - 1/- 2/- 1/- 2/6
-(e) Weekly Income of the whole
-Family. 7s. 0d. 11s.
-6d. 5s. 0d.
-(f) Weekly Rent. 1s. 0d. 0s.
-10d. 1s. 0d.
-(g) Total Weekly wage after
-deduction of Rent. 6s. 0d. 10s.
-8d. 4s. 0d.
-(h) Weekly income per head.83 1s. 0d. 2s. 1
-3/5d. 2s. 0d.
-The repeal of the Corn Laws gave a marvellous impulse to English agriculture. 84Drainage on the
-most extensive scale, new methods of stall-feeding, and of the artificial cultivation of green crops,
-introduction of mechanical manuring apparatus, new treatment of clay soils, increased use of
-mineral manures, employment of the steam-engine, and of all kinds of new machinery, more
-intensive cultivation generally, characterised this epoch. Mr. Pusey, Chairman of the Royal
-Agricultural Society, declares that the (relative) expenses of farming have been reduced nearly
-one half by the introduction of new machinery. On the other hand, the actual return of the soil
-rose rapidly. Greater outlay of capital per acre, and, as a consequence, more rapid concentration
-of farms, were essential conditions of the new method.85 At the same time, the area under
-cultivation increased, from 1846 to 1856, by 464,119 acres, without reckoning the great area in
-the Eastern Counties which was transformed from rabbit warrens and poor pastures into
-magnificent corn-fields. It has already been seen that, at the same time, the total number of
-persons employed in agriculture fell. As far as the actual agricultural labourers of both sexes and
-of all ages are concerned, their number fell from 1,241,396, in 1851, to 1,163, 217 in 1861. 86 If
-the English Registrar-General, therefore, rightly remarks:
-“The increase of farmers and farm-labourers, since 1801, bears no kind of
-proportion ... to the increase of agricultural produce,”87
-this disproportion obtains much more for the last period, when a positive decrease of the
-agricultural population went hand in hand with increase of the area under cultivation, with more
-intensive cultivation, unheard-of accumulation of the capital incorporated with the soil, and
-devoted to its working, an augmentation in the products of the soil without parallel in the history
-of English agriculture, plethoric rent-rolls of landlords, and growing wealth of the capitalist
-farmers. If we take this, together with the swift, unbroken extension of the markets, viz., the
-towns, and the reign of Free Trade, then the agricultural labourer was at last, post tot discrimina
-rerum, placed in circumstances that ought, secundum artem, to have made him drunk with
-happiness.
-But Professor Rogers comes to the conclusion that the lot of the English agricultural labourer of
-today, not to speak of his predecessor in the last half of the 14th and in the 15th century, but only
-compared with his predecessor from 1770 to 1780, has changed for the worse to an extraordinary
-470 Chapter 25
-extent, that “the peasant has again become a serf,” and a serf worse fed and worse clothed.88 Dr.
-Julian Hunter, in his epoch making report on the dwellings of the agricultural labourers, says:
-“The cost of the hind” (a name for the agricultural labourer, inherited from the
-time of serfdom) “is fixed at the lowest possible amount on which he can live ...
-the supplies of wages and shelter are not calculated on the profit to be derived
-from him. He is a zero in farming calculations ... 89 The means [of subsistence]
-being always supposed to be a fixed quantity. 90As to any further reduction of his
-income, he may say, nihil habeo nihil curo. He has no fears for the future, because
-he has now only the spare supply necessary to keep him. He has reached the zero
-from which are dated the calculations of the farmer. Come what will, he has no
-share either in prosperity or adversity.”91
-In the year 1863, an official inquiry took place into the conditions of nourishment and labour of
-the criminals condemned to transportation and penal servitude. The results are recorded in two
-voluminous Blue books. Among other things it is said:
-“From an elaborate comparison between the diet of convicts in the convict prisons
-in England, and that of paupers in workhouses and of free labourers in the same
-country ... it certainly appears that the former are much better fed than either of
-the two other classes,”92 whilst “the amount of labour required from an ordinary
-convict under penal servitude is about one half of what would be done by an
-ordinary day-labourer.” 93
-A few characteristic depositions of witnesses: John Smith, governor of the Edinburgh prison,
-deposes:
-No. 5056. “The diet of the English prisons [is] superior to that of ordinary
-labourers in England.” No 50. “It is the fact ... that the ordinary agricultural
-labourers in Scotland very seldom get any meat at all.” Answer No. 3047. “Is
-there anything that you are aware of to account for the necessity of feeding them
-very much better than ordinary labourers? – Certainly not.” No. 3048. “Do you
-think that further experiments ought to be made in order to ascertain whether a
-dietary might not be hit upon for prisoners employed on public works nearly
-approaching to the dietary of free labourers? ...”94 “He [the agricultural labourer]
-might say: ‘I work hard, and have not enough to eat, and when in prison I did not
-work harder where I had plenty to eat, and therefore it is better for me to be in
-prison again than here.’” 95
-From the tables appended to the first volume of the Report I have compiled the annexed
-comparative summary.
-471 Chapter 25
-WEEKLY AMOUNT OF NUTRIENTS
-Quantity Of
-Nitrogenous
-Ingredients
-Quantity Of
-Non-Nitro-
-genous In-
-gredients
-Quantity Of
-Mineral
-Matter
-TOTAL
-Ounces Ounces Ounces Ounces
-Portland (convict) 28.95 150.06 4.68 183.69
-Sailor in the Navy 29.63 152.91 4.52 187.06
-Soldier 25.55 114.49 3.94 143.98
-Working Coachmaker 24.53 162.06 4.23 190.82
-Compositor 21.24 100.83 3.12 125.19
-Agricultural
-labourer96
-17.73 118.06 3.29 139.08
-The general result of the inquiry by the medical commission of 1863 on the food of the lowest fed
-classes, is already known to the reader. He will remember that the diet of a great part of the
-agricultural labourers’ families is below the minimum necessary “to arrest starvation diseases.”
-This is especially the case in all the purely rural districts of Cornwall, Devon, Somerset, Wilts,
-Stafford, Oxford, Berks, and Herts.
-“The nourishment obtained by the labourer himself,” says Dr. E. Smith, “is larger
-than the average quantity indicates, since he eats a larger share ... necessary to
-enable him to perform his labour ... of food than the other members of the family,
-including in the poorer districts nearly all the meat and bacon.... The quantity of
-food obtained by the wife and also by the children at the period of rapid growth, is
-in many cases, in almost every county, deficient, and particularly in nitrogen.”97
-The male and female servants living with the farmers themselves are sufficiently nourished. Their
-number fell from 288,277 in 1851, to 204,962 in 1861.
-“The labour of women in the fields,” says Dr. Smith, “whatever may be its
-disadvantages, ... is under present circumstances of great advantage to the family,
-since it adds that amount of income which ... provides shoes and clothing and pays
-the rent, and thus enables the family to be better fed.” 98
-One of the most remarkable results of the inquiry was that the agricultural labourer of England, as
-compared with other parts of the United Kingdom, “is considerably the worst fed,” as the
-appended table shows:
-Quantities of Carbon and Nitrogen weekly consumed by an average agricultural adult:
-Carbon,
-grains
-Nitrogen,
-grains
-England 46,673 1,594
-Wales 48,354 2,031
-Scotland 48,980 2,348
-Ireland99 43,366 2,434
-“To the insufficient quantity and miserable quality of the house accommodation
-generally had,” says Dr. Simon, in his official Health Report, “by our agricultural
-472 Chapter 25
-labourers, almost every page of Dr. Hunter’s report bears testimony. And
-gradually, for many years past, the state of the labourer in these respects has been
-deteriorating, house-room being now greatly more difficult for him to find, and,
-when found, greatly less suitable to his needs than, perhaps, for centuries had been
-the case. Especially within the last twenty or thirty years, the evil has been in very
-rapid increase, and the household circumstances of the labourer are now in the
-highest degree deplorable. Except in so far as they whom his labour enriches, see
-fit to treat him with a kind of pitiful indulgence, he is quite peculiarly helpless in
-the matter. Whether he shall find house-room on the land which he contributes to
-till, whether the house-room which he gets shall be human or swinish, whether he
-shall have the little space of garden that so vastly lessens the pressure of his
-poverty – all this does not depend on his willingness and ability to pay reasonable
-rent for the decent accommodation he requires, but depends on the use which
-others may see fit to make of their ‘right to do as they will with their own.’
-However large may be a farm, there is no law that a certain proportion of
-labourers’ dwellings (much less of decent dwellings) shall be upon it; nor does
-any law reserve for the labourer ever so little right in that soil to which his
-industry is as needful as sun and rain.... An extraneous element weighs the balance
-heavily against him ... the influence of the Poor Law in its provisions concerning
-settlement and chargeability.100 Under this influence, each parish has a pecuniary
-interest in reducing to a minimum the number of its resident labourers: – for,
-unhappily, agricultural labour instead of implying a safe and permanent
-independence for the hardworking labourer and his family, implies for the most
-part only a longer or shorter circuit to eventual pauperism – a pauperism which,
-during the whole circuit, is so near, that any illness or temporary failure of
-occupation necessitates immediate recourse to parochial relief – and thus all
-residence of agricultural population in a parish is glaringly an addition to its poor-
-rates .... Large proprietors 101 ... have but to resolve that there shall be no
-labourers’ dwellings on their estates, and their estates will thenceforth be virtually
-free from half their responsibility for the poor. How far it has been intended, in the
-English constitution and law, that this kind of unconditional property in land
-should be acquirable, and that a landlord ‘doing as he wills with his own,’ should
-be able to treat the cultivators of the soil as aliens, whom he may expel from his
-territory, is a question which I do not pretend to discuss.... For that (power) of
-eviction ... does not exist only in theory. On a very large scale it prevails in
-practice – prevails ... as a main governing condition in the household
-circumstances of agricultural labour.... As regards the extent of the evil, it may
-suffice to refer to the evidence which Dr. Hunter has compiled from the last
-census, that destruction of houses, notwithstanding increased local demands for
-them, had, during the last ten years, been in progress in 821 separate parishes or
-townships of England, so that irrespectively of persons who had been forced to
-become non-resident (that is in the parishes in which they work), these parishes
-and townships were receiving in 1861, as compared with 1851, a population 5 1/3
-per cent. greater, into houseroom 4½ per cent. less... When the process of
-depopulation has completed itself, the result, says Dr. Hunter, is a show-village
-where the cottages have been reduced to a few, and where none but persons who
-are needed as shepherds, gardeners, or game-keepers, are allowed to live; regular
-servants who receive the good treatment usual to their class.102 But the land
-473 Chapter 25
-requires cultivation, and it will be found that the labourers employed upon it are
-not the tenants of the owner, but that they come from a neighbouring open village,
-perhaps three miles off, where a numerous small proprietary had received them
-when their cottages were destroyed in the close villages around. Where things are
-tending to the above result, often the cottages which stand, testify, in their
-unrepaired and wretched condition, to the extinction to which they are doomed.
-They are seen standing in the various stages of natural decay. While the shelter
-holds together, the labourer is permitted to rent it, and glad enough he will often
-be to do so, even at the price of decent lodging. But no repair, no improvement
-shall it receive, except such as its penniless occupants can supply. And when at
-last it becomes quite uninhabitable – uninhabitable even to the humblest standard
-of serfdom – it will be but one more destroyed cottage, and future poor-rates will
-be somewhat lightened. While great owners are thus escaping from poor-rates
-through the depopulation of lands over which they have control, the nearest town
-or open village receive the evicted labourers: the nearest, I say, but this “nearest”
-may mean three or four miles distant from the farm where the labourer has his
-daily toil. To that daily toil there will then have to be added, as though it were
-nothing, the daily need of walking six or eight miles for power of earning his
-bread. And whatever farm work is done by his wife and children, is done at the
-same disadvantage. Nor is this nearly all the toil which the distance occasions
-him. In the open village, cottage-speculators buy scraps of land, which they throng
-as densely as they can with the cheapest of all possible hovels. And into those
-wretched habitations (which, even if they adjoin the open country, have some of
-the worst features of the worst town residences) crowd the agricultural labourers
-of England. 103.... Nor on the other hand must it be supposed that even when the
-labourer is housed upon the lands which he cultivates, his household
-circumstances are generally such as his life of productive industry would seem to
-deserve. Even on princely estates ... his cottage ... may be of the meanest
-description. There are landlords who deem any stye good enough for their
-labourer and his family, and who yet do not disdain to drive with him the hardest
-possible bargain for rent.104 It may be but a ruinous one-bedroomed hut, having no
-fire-grate, no privy, no opening window, no water supply but the ditch, no garden
-– but the labourer is helpless against the wrong.... And the Nuisances Removal
-Acts ... are ... a mere dead letter ... in great part dependent for their working on
-such cottage-owners as the one from whom his (the labourer’s) hovel is rented....
-From brighter, but exceptional scenes, it is requisite in the interests of justice, that
-attention should again be drawn to the overwhelming preponderance of facts
-which are a reproach to the civilisation of England. Lamentable indeed, must be
-the case, when, notwithstanding all that is evident with regard to the quality of the
-present accommodation, it is the common conclusion of competent observers that
-even the general badness of dwellings is an evil infinitely less urgent than their
-mere numerical insufficiency. For years the over-crowding of rural labourers’
-dwellings has been a matter of deep concern, not only to persons who care for
-sanitary good, but to persons who care for decent and moral life. For, again and
-again in phrases so uniform that they seem stereotyped, reporters on the spread of
-epidemic disease in rural districts, have insisted on the extreme importance of that
-over-crowding, as an influence which renders it a quite hopeless task, to attempt
-the limiting of any infection which is introduced. And again and again it has been
-474 Chapter 25
-pointed out that, notwithstanding the many salubrious influences which there are
-in country life, the crowding which so favours the extension of contagious
-disease, also favours the origination of disease which is not contagious. And those
-who have denounced the over-crowded state of our rural population have not been
-silent as to a further mischief. Even where their primary concern has been only
-with the injury to health, often almost perforce they have referred to other
-relations on the subject. In showing how frequently it happens that adult persons
-of both sexes, married and unmarried, are huddled together in single small
-sleeping rooms, their reports have carried the conviction that, under the
-circumstances they describe, decency must always be outraged, and morality
-almost of necessity must suffer.105 Thus, for instance, in the appendix of my last
-annual report, Dr. Ord, reporting on an outbreak of fever at Wing, in
-Buckinghamshire, mentions how a young man who had come thither from
-Wingrave with fever, “in the first days of his illness slept in a room with nine
-other persons. Within a fortnight several of these persons were attacked, and in the
-course of a few weeks five out of the nine had fever, and one died...” From Dr.
-Harvey, of St. George’s Hospital, who, on private professional business, visited
-Wing during the time of the epidemic, I received information exactly in the sense
-of the above report.... “A young woman having fever, lay at night in a room
-occupied by her father and mother, her bastard child, two young men (her
-brothers), and her two sisters, each with a bastard child – 10 persons in all. A few
-weeks ago 13 persons slept in it.”106
-Dr. Hunter investigated 5,375 cottages of agricultural labourers, not only in the purely
-agricultural districts, but in all counties of England. Of these, 2,195 had only one bedroom (often
-at the same time used as living-room), 2,930 only two, and 250, more than two. I will give a few
-specimens culled from a dozen counties.
-(1.) Bedfordshire
-Wrestlingworth. Bedrooms about 12 feet long and 10 broad, although many are smaller than this.
-The small, one-storied cots are often divided by partitions into two bedrooms, one bed frequently
-in a kitchen, 5 feet 6 inches in height. Rent, £3 a year. The tenants have to make their own
-privies, the landlord only supplies a hole. As soon as one has made a privy, it is made use of by
-the whole neighbourhood. One house, belonging to a family called Richardson, was of quite
-unapproachable beauty. “Its plaster walls bulged very like a lady’s dress in a curtsey. One gable
-end was convex, the other concave, and on this last, unfortunately, stood the chimney, a curved
-tube of clay and wood like an elephant’s trunk. A long stick served as prop to prevent the
-chimney from falling. The doorway and window were rhomboidal.” Of 17 houses visited, only 4
-had more than one bedroom, and those four overcrowded. The cots with one bedroom sheltered 3
-adults and 3 children, a married couple with 6 children, &c.
-Dunton. High rents, from £4 to £5; weekly wages of the man, 10s. They hope to pay the rent by
-the straw-plaiting of the family. The higher the rent, the greater the number that must work
-together to pay it. Six adults, living with 4 children in one sleeping apartment, pay £3 10s. for it.
-The cheapest house in Dunton, 15 feet long externally, 10 broad, let for £3. Only one of the
-houses investigated had 2 bedrooms. A little outside the village, a house whose “tenants dunged
-against the house-side,” the lower 9 inches of the door eaten away through sheer rottenness; the
-doorway, a single opening closed at night by a few bricks, ingeniously pushed up after shutting
-and covered with some matting. Half a window, with glass and frame, had gone the way of all
-475 Chapter 25
-flesh. Here, without furniture, huddled together were 3 adults and 5 children. Dunton is not worse
-than the rest of Biggleswade Union.
-(2.) Berkshire
-Beenham. In June, 1864, a man, his wife and 4 children lived in a cot (one-storied cottage). A
-daughter came home from service with scarlet fever. She died. One child sickened and died. The
-mother and one child were down with typhus when Dr. Hunter was called in. The father and one
-child slept outside, but the difficulty of securing isolation was seen here, for in the crowded
-market of the miserable village lay the linen of the fever-stricken household, waiting for the
-wash. The rent of H.’s house, 1s. a-week; one bedroom for man, wife, and 6 children. One house
-let for 8d. a-week, 14 feet 6 inches long, 7 feet broad, kitchen, 6 feet high; the bedroom without
-window, fire-place, door, or opening, except into the lobby; no garden. A man lived here for a
-little while, with two grown-up daughters and one grown-up son; father and son slept on the bed,
-the girls in the passage. Each of the latter had a child while the family was living here, but one
-went to the workhouse for her confinement and then came home.
-(3.) Buckinghamshire
-30 cottages – on 1,000 acres of land – contained here about 130-140 persons. The parish of
-Bradenham comprises 1,000 acres; it numbered, in 1851, 36 houses and a population of 84 males
-and 54 females. This inequality of the sexes was partly remedied in 1861, when they numbered
-98 males and 87 females; increase in 10 years of 14 men and 33 women. Meanwhile, the number
-of houses was one less.
-Winslow. Great part of this newly built in good style; demand for houses appears very marked,
-since very miserable cots let at 1s. to 1s. 3d. per week.
-Water Eaton. Here the landlords, in view of the increasing population, have destroyed about 20
-per cent. of the existing houses. A poor labourer, who had to go about 4 miles to his work,
-answered the question, whether he could not find a cot nearer: “No; they know better than to take
-a man in with my large family.”
-Tinker’s End, near Winslow. A bedroom in which were 4 adults and 4 children; 11 feet long, 9
-feet broad, 6 feet 5 inches high at its highest part; another 11 feet 3 inches by 9 feet, 5 feet 10
-inches high, sheltered 6 persons. Each of these families had less space than is considered
-necessary for a convict. No house had more than one bedroom, not one of them a back-door;
-water very scarce; weekly rent from 1s. 4d. to 2s. In 16 of the houses visited, only 1 man that
-earned 10s. a-week. The quantity of air for each person under the circumstances just described
-corresponds to that which he would have if he were shut up in a box of 4 feet measuring each
-way, the whole night. But then, the ancient dens afforded a certain amount of unintentional
-ventilation.
-(4.) Cambridgeshire
-Gamblingay belongs to several landlords. It contains the wretchedest cots to be found anywhere.
-Much straw-plaiting. “A deadly lassitude, a hopeless surrendering up to filth,” reigns in
-Gamblingay. The neglect in its centre, becomes mortification at its extremities, north and south,
-where the houses are rotting to pieces. The absentee landlords bleed this poor rookery too freely.
-The rents are very high; 8 or 9 persons packed in one sleeping apartment, in 2 cases 6 adults, each
-with 1 or 2 children in one small bedroom.
-(5.) Essex
-In this county, diminutions in the number of persons and of cottages go, in many parishes, hand in
-hand. In not less than 22 parishes, however, the destruction of houses has not prevented increase
-476 Chapter 25
-of population, or has not brought about that expulsion which, under the name “migration to
-towns,” generally occurs. In Fingringhoe, a parish of 3,443 acres, were in 1851, 145 houses; in
-1861, only 110. But the people did not wish to go away, and managed even to increase under
-these circumstances. In 1851, 252 persons inhabited 61 houses, but in 1861, 262 persons were
-squeezed into 49 houses. In Basilden, in 1851, 157 persons lived on 1,827 acres, in 35 houses; at
-the end of ten years, 180 persons in 27 houses. In the parishes of Fingringhoe, South Fambridge,
-Widford, Basilden, and Ramsden Crags, in 1851, 1,392 persons were living on 8,449 acres in 316
-houses; in 1861, on the same area, 1,473 persons in 249 houses.
-(6.) Herefordshire
-This little county has suffered more from the “eviction-spirit” than any other in England. At
-Nadby, overcrowded cottages generally, with only 2 bedrooms, belonging for the most part to the
-farmers. They easily let them for £3 or £4 a-year, and paid a weekly wage of 9s.
-(7.) Huntingdon
-Hartford had, in 1851, 87 houses; shortly after this, 19 cottages were destroyed in this small
-parish of 1,720 acres; population in 1831, 452; in 1852, 382; and in 1861, 341. 14 cottages, each
-with 1 bedroom, were visited. In one, a married couple, 3 grown-up sons, 1 grown-up daughter, 4
-children – in all 10 in another, 3 adults, 6 children. One of these rooms, in which 8 people slept,
-was 12 feet 10 inches long, 12 feet 2 inches broad, 6 feet 9 inches high: the average, without
-making any deduction for projections into the apartment, gave about 130 cubic feet per head. In
-the 14 sleeping rooms, 34 adults and 33 children. These cottages are seldom provided with
-gardens, but many of the inmates are able to farm small allotments at 10s. or 12s. per rood. These
-allotments are at a distance from the houses, which are without privies. The family “must either
-go to the allotment to deposit their ordures,” or, as happens in this place, saving your presence,
-“use a closet with a trough set like a drawer in a chest of drawers, and drawn out weekly and
-conveyed to the allotment to be emptied where its contents were wanted.” In Japan, the circle of
-life-conditions moves more decently than this.
-(8.) Lincolnshire
-Langtoft. A man lives here, in Wright’s house, with his wife, her mother, and 5 children; the
-house has a front kitchen, scullery, bedroom over the front kitchen; front kitchen and bedroom, 12
-feet 2 inches by 9 feet 5 inches; the whole ground floor, 21 feet 2 inches by 9 feet 5 inches. The
-bedroom is a garret: the walls run together into the roof like a sugar-loaf, a dormer-window
-opening in front. “Why did he live here? On account of the garden? No; it is very small. Rent?
-High, 1s. 3d. per week. Near his work? No; 6 miles away, so that he walks daily, to and fro, 12
-miles. He lived there, because it was a tenantable cot,” and because he wanted to have a cot for
-himself alone, anywhere, at any price, and in any conditions. The following are the statistics of 12
-houses in Langtoft, with 12 bedrooms, 38 adults, and 36 children.
-TWELVE HOUSES IN LANGTOFT
-House No.
-1.
-No.
-2.
-No.
-3.
-No.
-4.
-No.
-5.
-No.
-6.
-No.
-7.
-No.
-8.
-No.
-9.
-No.
-10.
-No.
-11.
-No.
-12.
-Bedrooms. 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
-Adults. 3 4 4 5 2 5 3 3 2 2 3 2
-Children. 5 3 4 4 2 3 3 2 0 3 3 4
-Number of
-Persons. 8 7 8 9 4 8 6 5 2 .5 6 6
-477 Chapter 25
-(9.) Kent
-Kennington, very seriously over-populated in 1859, when diphtheria appeared, and the parish
-doctor instituted a medical inquiry into the condition of the poorer classes. He found that in this
-locality, where much labour is employed, various cots had been destroyed and no new ones built.
-In one district stood four houses, named birdcages; each had 4 rooms of the following dimensions
-in feet and inches:
-Kitchen: 9 ft. 5 by 8 ft. 11 by 6 ft. 6
-Scullery: 8 ft. 6 by 4 ft. 6 by 6 ft. 6
-Bedroom: 8 ft. 5 by 5 ft. 10 by 6 ft. 3
-Bedroom: 8 ft. 3 by 8 ft. 4 by 6 ft. 3
-(10.) Northamptonshire
-Brinworth, Pickford and Floore: in these villages in the winter 20-30 men were lounging about
-the streets from want of work. The farmers do not always till sufficiently the corn and turnip
-lands, and the landlord has found it best to throw all his farms together into 2 or 3. Hence want of
-employment. Whilst on one side of the wall, the land calls for labour, on the other side the
-defrauded labourers are casting at it longing glances. Feverishly overworked in summer, and half-
-starved in winter, it is no wonder if they say in their peculiar dialect, “the parson and gentlefolk
-seem frit to death at them.”
-At Floore, instances, in one bedroom of the smallest size, of couples with 4, 5, 6 children; 3
-adults with 5 children; a couple with grandfather and 6 children down with scarlet fever, &c.; in
-two houses with two bedrooms, two families of 8 and 9 adults respectively.
-(11.) Wiltshire
-Stratton. 31 houses visited, 8 with only one bedroom. Pentill, in the same parish: a cot let at Is.
-3d. weekly with 4 adults and 4 children, had nothing good about it, except the walls, from the
-floor of rough-hewn pieces of stones to the roof of worn-out thatch.
-(12.) Worcestershire
-House-destruction here not quite so excessive; yet from 1851 to 1861, the number of inhabitants
-to each house on the average, has risen from 4.2 to 4.6.
-Badsey. Many cots and little gardens here. Some of the farmers declare that the cots are “a great
-nuisance here, because they bring the poor.” On the statement of one gentleman:
-“The poor are none the better for them; if you build 500 they will let fast enough, in fact, the
-more you build, the more they want”
-(according to him the houses give birth to the inhabitants, who then by a law of Nature press on
-“the means of housing”). Dr. Hunter remarks:
-“Now these poor must come from somewhere, and as there is no particular attraction, such as
-doles, at Badsey, it must be repulsion from some other unfit place, which will send them here. If
-each could find an allotment near his work, he would not prefer Badsey, where he pays for his
-scrap of ground twice as much as the farmer pays for his.”
-The continual emigration to the towns, the continual formation of surplus population in the
-country through the concentration of farms, conversion of arable land into pasture, machinery,
-&c., and the continual eviction of the agricultural population by the destruction of their cottages,
-go hand in hand. The more empty the district is of men, the greater is its “relative surplus
-population,” the greater is their pressure on the means of employment, the greater is the absolute
-478 Chapter 25
-excess of the agricultural population over the means for housing it, the greater, therefore, in the
-villages is the local surplus population and the most pestilential packing together of human
-beings. The packing together of knots of men in scattered little villages and small country towns
-corresponds to the forcible draining of men from the surface of the land. The continuous
-superseding of the agricultural labourers, in spite of their diminishing number and the increasing
-mass of their products, gives birth to their pauperism. Their pauperism is ultimately a motive to
-their eviction and the chief source of their miserable housing which breaks down their last power
-of resistance, and makes them more slaves of the landed proprietors and the farmers.107 Thus the
-minimum of wages becomes a law of Nature to them. On the other hand, the land, in spite of its
-constant “relative surplus population,” is at the same time underpopulated. This is seen, not only
-locally at the points where the efflux of men to towns, mines, railroad-making, &c., is most
-marked. It is to be seen everywhere, in harvest-time as well as in spring and summer, at those
-frequently recurring times when English agriculture, so careful and intensive, wants extra hands.
-There are always too many agricultural labourers for the ordinary, and always too few for the
-exceptional or temporary needs of the cultivation of the soil.108 Hence we find in the official
-documents contradictory complaints from the same places of deficiency and excess of labour
-simultaneously. The temporary or local want of labour brings about no rise in wages, but a
-forcing of the women and children into the fields, and exploitation at an age constantly lowered.
-As soon as the exploitation of the women and children takes place on a larger scale, it becomes in
-turn a new means of making a surplus population of the male agricultural labourer and of keeping
-down his wage. In the east of England thrives a beautiful fruit of this vicious circle – the so-called
-gang-system, to which I must briefly return here. 109
-The gang-system obtains almost exclusively in the counties of Lincoln, Huntingdon, Cambridge,
-Norfolk, Suffolk, and Nottingham, here and there in the neighbouring counties of Northampton,
-Bedford, and Rutland. Lincolnshire will serve us as an example. A large part of this county is new
-land, marsh formerly, or even, as in others of the eastern counties just named, won lately from the
-sea. The steam-engine has worked wonders in the way of drainage. What were once fens and
-sandbanks, bear now a luxuriant sea of corn and the highest of rents. The same thing holds of the
-alluvial lands won by human endeavour, as in the island of Axholme and other parishes on the
-banks of the Trent. In proportion as the new farms arose, not only were no new cottages built: old
-ones were demolished, and the supply of labour had to come from open villages, miles away, by
-long roads that wound along the sides of the hills. There alone had the population formerly found
-shelter from the incessant floods of the winter-time. The labourers that dwell on the farms of 400-
-1,000 acres (they are called “confined labourers”) are solely employed on such kinds of
-agricultural work as is permanent, difficult, and carried on by aid of horses. For every 100 acres
-there is, on an average, scarcely one cottage. A fen farmer, e.g., gave evidence before the
-Commission of Inquiry:
-“I farm 320 acres, all arable land. I have not one cottage on my farm. I have only
-one labourer on my farm now. I have four horsemen lodging about. We get light
-work done by gangs.” 110
-The soil requires much light field labour, such as weeding, hoeing, certain processes of manuring,
-removing of stones, &c. This is done by the gangs, or organised bands that dwell in the open
-villages.
-The gang consists of 10 to 40 or 50 persons, women, young persons of both sexes (13-18 years of
-age, although the boys are for the most part eliminated at the age of 13), and children of both
-sexes (6-13 years of age). At the head is the gang master, always an ordinary agricultural
-labourer, generally what is called a bad lot, a scapegrace, unsteady, drunken, but with a dash of
-479 Chapter 25
-enterprise and savoir-faire. He is the recruiting-sergeant for the gang, which works under him,
-not under the farmer. He generally arranges with the latter for piece-work, and his income, which
-on the average is not very much above that of an ordinary agricultural labourer, 111depends almost
-entirely upon the dexterity with which he manages to extract within the shortest time the greatest
-possible amount of labour from his gang. The farmers have discovered that women work steadily
-only under the direction of men, but that women and children, once set going, impetuously spend
-their life-force – as Fourier knew – while the adult male labourer is shrewd enough to economise
-his as much as he can. The gang-master goes from one farm to another, and thus employs his
-gang from 6 to 8 months in the year. Employment by him is, therefore, much more lucrative and
-more certain for the labouring families, than employment by the individual farmer, who only
-employs children occasionally. This circumstance so completely rivets his influence in the open
-villages that children are generally only to be hired through his instrumentality. The lending out
-of these individually, independently of the gang, is his second trade.
-The “drawbacks” of the system are the overwork of the children and young persons, the
-enormous marches that they make daily to and from the farms, 5, 6, and sometimes 7 miles
-distant, finally, the demoralisation of the gang. Although the gang-master, who, in some districts
-is called “the driver,” is armed with a long stick, he uses it but seldom, and complaints of brutal
-treatment are exceptional. He is a democratic emperor, or a kind of Pied Piper of Hamelin. He
-must therefore be popular with his subjects, and he binds them to himself by the charms of the
-gipsy life under his direction. Coarse freedom, a noisy jollity, and obscenest impudence give
-attractions to the gang. Generally the gangmaster pays up in a public house; then he returns home
-at the head of the procession reeling drunk, propped up right and left by a stalwart virago, while
-children and young persons bring up the rear, boisterous, and singing chaffing and bawdy songs.
-On the return journey what Fourier calls “phanerogamie,” is the order of the day. The getting with
-child of girls of 13 and 14 by their male companions of the same age, is common. The open
-villages which supply the contingent of the gang, become Sodoms and Gomorrahs,112 and have
-twice as high a rate of illegitimate births as the rest of the kingdom. The moral character of girls
-bred in these schools, when married women, was shown above. Their children, when opium does
-not give them the finishing stroke, are born recruits of the gang.
-The gang in its classical form just described, is called the public, common, or tramping gang. For
-there are also private gangs. These are made up in the same way as the common gang, but count
-fewer members, and work, not under a gang-master, but under some old farm servant, whom the
-farmer does not know how to employ in any better way. The gipsy fun has vanished here, but
-according to all witnesses, the payment and treatment of the children is worse.
-The gang-system, which during the last years has steadily increased,113 clearly does not exist for
-the sake of the gang-master. It exists for the enrichment of the large farmers, 114and indirectly of
-the landlords.115 For the farmer there is no more ingenious method of keeping his labourers well
-below the normal level, and yet of always having an extra hand ready for extra work, of
-extracting the greatest possible amount of labour with the least possible amount of money 116 and
-of making adult male labour “redundant.” From the exposition already made, it will be
-understood why, on the one hand, a greater or less lack of employment for the agricultural
-labourer is admitted, while on the other, the gang-system is at the same time declared “necessary”
-on account of the want of adult male labour and its migration to the towns.117 The cleanly weeded
-land, and the uncleanly human weeds, of Lincolnshire, are pole and counterpole of capitalistic
-production.118
-480 Chapter 25
-F. Ireland
-In concluding this section, we must travel for a moment to Ireland. First, the main facts of the
-case.
-The population of Ireland had, in 1841, reached 8,222,664; in 1851, it had dwindled to 6,623,985;
-in 1861, to 5,850,309; in 1866, to 5½ millions, nearly to its level in 1801. The diminution began
-with the famine year, 1846, so that Ireland, in less than twenty years, lost more than 5/16 ths of its
-people. 119 Its total emigration from May, 1851, to July, 1865, numbered 1,591,487: the
-emigration during the years 1861-1865 was more than half-a-million. The number of inhabited
-houses fell, from 1851-1861, by 52,990. From 1851-1861, the number of holdings of 15 to 30
-acres increased 61,000, that of holdings over 30 acres, 109,000, whilst the total number of all
-farms fell 120,000, a fall, therefore, solely due to the suppression of farms under 15 acres – i.e., to
-their centralisation.
-Table A
-LIVE-STOCK
-Year
-Horses Cattle Sheep Pigs
-Total
-Number Decrease Total
-Number Decrease Increase Total
-Number Decrease Increase Total
-Number Decrease Increase
-1860 619,811 – 3,606,374 – – 3,542,080 – – 1,271,072 – –
-1861 614,232 5,579 3,471,688 134,686 – 3,556,050 – 13,970 1,102,042 169,030 –
-1862 602,894 11,338 3,254,890 216,798 – 3,456,132 99,918 – 1,154,324 – 52,282
-1863 579,978 22,916 3,144,231 110,659 – 3,308,204 147,982 – 1,067,458 86,866 –
-1864 562,158 17,820 3,262,294 – 118,063 3,366,941 – 58,737 1,058,480 8,978 –
-1865 547,867 14,291 3,493,414 – 231,120 3,688,742 – 321,801 1,299,893 – 241,413
-The decrease of the population was naturally accompanied by a decrease in the mass of products.
-For our purpose, it suffices to consider the 5 years from 1861-1865 during which over half-a-
-million emigrated, and the absolute number of people sank by more than 1/3 of a million. From
-the above table it results: –
-Horses Cattle Sheep Pigs
-Absolute Decrease Absolute Decrease Absolute Increase Absolute Increase
-71,944 112,960 146,662 28,8211120
-Let us now turn to agriculture, which yields the means of subsistence for cattle and for men. In the following table is calculated the decrease or increase
-for each separate year, as compared with its immediate predecessor. The Cereal Crops include wheat, oats, barley, rye, beans, and peas; the Green Crops,
-potatoes, turnips, marigolds, beet-root, cabbages, carrots, parsnips, vetches. &c.
-481 Chapter 25
-Table B
-INCREASE OR DECREASE IN THE AREA UNDER CROPS AND GRASS IN ACREAGE
-Year
-Cereal
-Crops
-Green
-Crops
-Grass and
-Clover Flax
-Total
-Cultivated
-Land
-Decrease
-(Acres)
-Decrease
-(Acres)
-Increase
-(Acres)
-Decrease
-(Acres)
-Increase
-(Acres)
-Decrease
-(Acres)
-Increase
-(Acres)
-Decrease
-(Acres)
-Increase
-(Acres)
-1861 15,701 36,974 – 47,969 – – 19,271 81,373 –
-1862 72,734 74,785 – – 6,623 – 2,055 138,841 –
-1863 144,719 19,358 – – 7,724 – 63,922 92,431 –
-1864 122,437 2,317 – – 47,486 – 87,761 – 10,493
-1865 72,450 – 25,241 – 68,970 50,159 – 28,398 –
-1861-65 428,041 108,193 – – 82,834 – 122,8501 330,350 –
-In the year 1865, 127,470 additional acres came under the heading “grass land,” chiefly because
-the area under the heading of “bog and waste unoccupied,” decreased by 101,543 acres. If we
-compare 1865 with 1864, there is a decrease in cereals of 246,667 qrs., of which 48,999 were
-wheat, 160,605 oats, 29,892 barley, &c.: the decrease in potatoes was 446,398 tons, although the
-area of their cultivation increased in 1865.
-From the movement of population and the agricultural produce of Ireland, we pass to the
-movement in the purse of its landlords, larger farmers, and industrial capitalists. It is reflected in
-the rise and fall of the Income-tax. It may be remembered that Schedule D. (profits with the
-exception of those of farmers), includes also the so-called, “professional” profits – i.e., the
-incomes of lawyers, doctors, &c.; and the Schedules C. and E., in which no special details are
-given, include the incomes of employees, officers, State sinecurists, State fundholders, &c.
-482 Chapter 25
-Table C 121
-INCREASE OR DECREASE IN THE AREA UNDER CULTIVATION,
-PRODUCT PER ACRE, AND TOTAL PRODUCT OF 1865 COMPARED WITH 1864
-Product Acres of
-Cultivated Land
-Product
-per Acre
-Total Product
-1864 1865
-Increase or
-Decrease, 1865 1864 1865
-Increase
-or
-Decrease,
-1865 1864 1865
-Increase or
-Decrease, 1865
-Wheat 276,483 266,989 – 9,494 cwt.,
-13.3
-13.0 – 0.3 875,782
-Qrs.
-826,783
-Qrs.
-– 48,999
-Qrs.
-Oats 1,814,886 1,745,228 – 69,658 cwt.,
-12.1
-12.3 0.2 – 7,826,332
-Qrs.
-7,659,727
-Qrs.
-– 166,605
-Qrs.
-Barley 172,700 177,102 4,402 – cwt.,
-15.9
-14.9 – 1.0 761,909
-Qrs.
-732,017
-Qrs.
-– 29,892
-Qrs.
-Bere 8,894 10,091 1,197 – cwt.,
-16.4
-14.8 – 1.6 15,160
-Qrs.
-13,989
-Qrs.
-– 1,171
-Qrs.
-Rye cwt.,
-8.5
-10.4 1.9 – 12,680
-Qrs.
-18,314
-Qrs.
-5,684
-Qrs.
-–
-Potatoes 1,039,724 1,066,260 26,536 – tons,
-4.1
-3.6 – 0.5 4,312,388
-ts.
-3,865,990
-ts.
-– 446,398
-ts.
-Turnips 337,355 334,212 – 3,143 tons,
-10.3
-9.9 – 0.4 3,467,659
-ts.
-3,301,683
-ts.
-– 165,976
-ts.
-Mangold-
-wurzel
-14,073 14,389 316 – tons,
-10.5
-13.3 2.8 – 147,284
-ts.
-191,937
-ts.
-44,653
-ts.
-–
-Cabbages 31,821 33,622 1,801 – tons,
-9.3
-10.4 1.1 – 297,375
-ts.
-350,252
-ts.
-52,877
-ts.
-–
-Flax 301,693 251,433 – 50,260 st. (14
-lb.)
-34.2
-25.2 – 9.0 64,506 st. 39,561 st. – 24,945
-st.
-Hay 1,609,569 1,678,493 68,9241 – tons,
-1.6
-1.8 0.2 – 2,607,153
-ts.
-3,068,707
-ts.
-461,554
-ts.
-–
-Table D
-THE INCOME-TAX ON THE SUBJOINED INCOMES IN POUNDS STERLING
-(Tenth Report of the Commissioners of Inland Revenue, Lond. 1866.)
-1860 1861 1862 1863 1864 1865
-Schedule A.
-Rent of Land 13,893,829 13,003,554 13,398,938 13,494,091 13,470,700 13,801,616
-Schedule B.
-Farmers’ Profits. 2,765,387 2,773,644 2,937,899 2,938,923 2,930,874 2,946,072
-Schedule D.
-Industrial,
-&c., Profits
-4,891,652 4,836,203 4,858,800 4,846,497 4,546,147 4,850,199
-Total Schedules
-A to E 22,962,885 22,998,394 23,597,574 23,658,631 23,236,298 23,930,340
-483 Chapter 25
-Under Schedule D., the average annual increase of income from 1853-1864 was only 0.93; whilst,
-in the same period, in Great Britain, it was 4.58. The following table shows the distribution of the
-profits (with the exception of those of farmers) for the years 1864 and 1865: –
-Table E122
-SCHEDULE D.
-INCOME FROM PROFITS (OVER £6O) IN IRELAND
-1864
-£
-1865
-£
-Total yearly
-income of
-4,368,610 divided
-among 17,467 persons.
-4,669,979 divided
-among 18,081 persons.
-Yearly income
-over £60
-and under £100
-238,726 divided
-among 5,015 persons.
-222,575 divided
-among 4,703 persons.
-Of the yearly
-total income
-1,979,066 divided
-among 11,321 persons.
-2,028,571 divided
-among 12,184 persons.
-Remainder of the
-total yearly income
-2,150,818 divided
-among 1,131 persons.
-2,418,833 divided
-among 1,194 persons.
-Of these
-1,073,906 divided
-among 1,010 persons.
-1,097,927 divided
-among 1,044 persons.
-1,076,912 divided
-among 121 persons.
-1,320,906 divided
-among 150 persons.
-430,535 divided
-among 95 persons.
-584,458 divided
-among 2 persons.
-646,377divided
-among 26
-736,448 divided
-among 28
-262,819 divided
-among 3
-274,528 divided
-among 3
-England, a country with fully developed capitalist production, and pre-eminently industrial,
-would have bled to death with such a drain of population as Ireland has suffered. But Ireland is at
-present only an agricultural district of England, marked off by a wide channel from the country to
-which it yields corn, wool, cattle, industrial and military recruits.
-The depopulation of Ireland has thrown much of the land out of cultivation, has greatly
-diminished the produce of the soil,123 and, in spite of the greater area devoted to cattle breeding,
-has brought about, in some of its branches, an absolute diminution, in others, an advance scarcely
-worthy of mention, and constantly interrupted by retrogressions. Nevertheless, with the fall in
-numbers of the population, rents and farmers’ profits rose, although the latter not as steadily as
-the former. The reason of this is easily comprehensible. On the one hand, with the throwing of
-small holdings into large ones, and the change of arable into pasture land, a larger part of the
-whole produce was transformed into surplus-produce. The surplus-produce increased, although
-the total produce, of which it formed a fraction, decreased. On the other hand, the money value of
-this surplus-produce increased yet more rapidly than its mass, in consequence of the rise in the
-English market price of meat, wool, &c., during the last 20, and especially during the last 10,
-years.
-484 Chapter 25
-The scattered means of production that serve the producers themselves as means of employment
-and of subsistence, without expanding their own value by the incorporation of the labour of
-others, are no more capital than a product consumed by its own producer is a commodity. If, with
-the mass of the population, that of the means of production employed in agriculture also
-diminished, the mass of the capital employed in agriculture increased, because a part of the means
-of production that were formerly scattered, was concentrated and turned into capital.
-The total capital of Ireland outside agriculture, employed in industry and trade, accumulated
-during the last two decades slowly, and with great and constantly recurring fluctuations; so much
-the more rapidly did the concentration of its individual constituents develop. And, however small
-its absolute increase, in proportion to the dwindling population it had increased largely.
-Here, then, under our own eyes and on a large scale, a process is revealed, than which nothing
-more excellent could be wished for by orthodox economy for the support of its dogma: that
-misery springs from absolute surplus population, and that equilibrium is re-established by
-depopulation. This is a far more important experiment than was the plague in the middle of the
-14th century so belauded of Malthusians. Note further: If only the naïveté of the schoolmaster
-could apply, to the conditions of production and population of the nineteenth century, the
-standard of the 14th, this naïveté, into the bargain, overlooked the fact that whilst, after the plague
-and the decimation that accompanied it, followed on this side of the Channel, in England,
-enfranchisement and enrichment of the agricultural population, on that side, in France, followed
-greater servitude and more misery.124
-The Irish famine of 1846 killed more than 1,000,000 people, but it killed poor devils only. To the
-wealth of the country it did not the slightest damage. The exodus of the next 20 years, an exodus
-still constantly increasing, did not, as, e.g., the Thirty Years’ War, decimate, along with the
-human beings, their means of production. Irish genius discovered an altogether new way of
-spiriting a poor people thousands of miles away from the scene of its misery. The exiles
-transplanted to the United States, send home sums of money every year as travelling expenses for
-those left behind. Every troop that emigrates one year, draws another after it the next. Thus,
-instead of costing Ireland anything, emigration forms one of the most lucrative branches of its
-export trade. Finally, it is a systematic process, which does not simply make a passing gap in the
-population, but sucks out of it every year more people than are replaced by the births, so that the
-absolute level of the population falls year by year.125
-What were the consequences for the Irish labourers left behind and freed from the surplus
-population? That the relative surplus population is today as great as before 1846; that wages are
-just as low, that the oppression of the labourers has increased, that misery is forcing the country
-towards a new crisis. The facts are simple. The revolution in agriculture has kept pace with
-emigration. The production of relative surplus population has more than kept pace with the
-absolute depopulation. A glance at table C. shows that the change of arable to pasture land must
-work yet more acutely in Ireland than in England. In England the cultivation of green crops
-increases with the breeding of cattle; in Ireland, it decreases. Whilst a large number of acres, that
-were formerly tilled, lie idle or are turned permanently into grass-land, a great part of the waste
-land and peat bogs that were unused formerly, become of service for the extension of cattle-
-breeding. The smaller and medium farmers – I reckon among these all who do not cultivate more
-than 100 acres – still make up about 8/10ths of the whole number.126 They are one after the other,
-and with a degree of force unknown before, crushed by the competition of an agriculture
-managed by capital, and therefore they continually furnish new recruits to the class of wage
-labourers. The one great industry of Ireland, linen-manufacture, requires relatively few adult men
-and only employs altogether, in spite of its expansion since the price of cotton rose in 1861-1866,
-485 Chapter 25
-a comparatively insignificant part of the population. Like all other great modern industries, it
-constantly produces, by incessant fluctuations, a relative surplus population within its own
-sphere, even with an absolute increase in the mass of human beings absorbed by it. The misery of
-the agricultural population forms the pedestal for gigantic shirt-factories, whose armies of
-labourers are, for the most part, scattered over the country. Here, we encounter again the system
-described above of domestic industry, which in underpayment and overwork, possesses its own
-systematic means for creating supernumerary labourers. Finally, although the depopulation has
-not such destructive consequences as would result in a country with fully developed capitalistic
-production, it does not go on without constant reaction upon the home-market. The gap which
-emigration causes here, limits not only the local demand for labour, but also the incomes of small
-shopkeepers, artisans, tradespeople generally. Hence the diminution in incomes between £60 and
-£100 in Table E.
-A clear statement of the condition of the agricultural labourers in Ireland is to be found in the
-Reports of the Irish Poor Law Inspectors (1870). 127Officials of a government which is
-maintained only by bayonets and by a state of siege, now open, now disguised, they have to
-observe all the precautions of language that their colleagues in England disdain. In spite of this,
-however, they do not let their government cradle itself in illusions. According to them the rate of
-wages in the country, still very low, has within the last 20 years risen 50-60 per cent., and stands
-now, on the average, at 6s. to 9s. per week. But behind this apparent rise, is hidden an actual fall
-in wages, for it does not correspond at all to the rise in price of the necessary means of
-subsistence that has taken place in the meantime. For proof, the following extract from the
-official accounts of an Irish workhouse.
-AVERAGE WEEKLY COST PER HEAD
-Year ended Provisions and
-Necessaries.
-Clothing. TOTAL.
-29th Sept., 1849. 1s. 3 1/4d. 3d. 1s. 6 1/4d.
-29th Sept., 1869. 2s. 7 1/4d. 6d. 3s. 1 1/4d.
-The price of the necessary means of subsistence is therefore fully twice, and that of clothing
-exactly twice, as much as they were 20 years before.
-Even apart from this disproportion, the mere comparison of the rate of wages expressed in gold
-would give a result far from accurate. Before the famine, the great mass of agricultural wages
-were paid in kind, only the smallest part in money; today, payment in money is the rule. From
-this it follows that, whatever the amount of the real wage, its money rate must rise.
-“Previous to the famine, the labourer enjoyed his cabin ... with a rood, or half-acre
-or acre of land, and facilities for ... a crop of potatoes. He was able to rear his pig
-and keep fowl.... But they now have to buy bread, and they have no refuse upon
-which they can feed a pig or fowl, and they have consequently no benefit from the
-sale of a pig, fowl, or eggs.”128
-In fact, formerly, the agricultural labourers were but the smallest of the small farmers, and formed
-for the most part a kind of rear-guard of the medium and large farms on which they found
-employment. Only since the catastrophe of 1846 have they begun to form a fraction of the class
-of purely wage labourers, a special class, connected with its wage-masters only by monetary
-relations.
-We know what were the conditions of their dwellings in 1846. Since then they have grown yet
-worse. A part of the agricultural labourers, which, however, grows less day by day, dwells still on
-486 Chapter 25
-the holdings of the farmers in over-crowded huts, whose hideousness far surpasses the worst that
-the English agricultural labourers offered us in this way. And this holds generally with the
-exception of certain tracts of Ulster; in the south, in the counties of Cork, Limerick, Kilkenny,
-&c.; in the east, in Wicklow, Wexford, &c.; in the centre of Ireland, in King’s and Queen’s
-County, Dublin, &c.; in the west, in Sligo, Roscommon, Mayo, Galway, &c.
-“The agricultural labourers’ huts,” an inspector cries out, “are a disgrace to the
-Christianity and to the civilisation of this country.” 129
-In order to increase the attractions of these holes for the labourers, the pieces of land belonging
-thereto from time immemorial, are systematically confiscated.
-“The mere sense that they exist subject to this species of ban, on the part of the
-landlords and their agents, has ... given birth in the minds of the labourers to
-corresponding sentiments of antagonism and dissatisfaction towards those by
-whom they are thus led to regard themselves as being treated as ... a proscribed
-race.” 130
-The first act of the agricultural revolution was to sweep away the huts situated on the field of
-labour. This was done on the largest scale, and as if in obedience to a command from on high.
-Thus many labourers were compelled to seek shelter in villages and towns. There they were
-thrown like refuse into garrets, holes, cellars and corners, in the worst back slums. Thousands of
-Irish families, who according to the testimony of the English, eaten up as these are with national
-prejudice, are notable for their rare attachment to the domestic hearth, for their gaiety and the
-purity of their home-life, found themselves suddenly transplanted into hotbeds of vice. The men
-are now obliged to seek work of the neighbouring farmers and are only hired by the day, and
-therefore under the most precarious form of wage. Hence
-“they sometimes have long distances to go to and from work, often get wet, and
-suffer much hardship, not unfrequently ending in sickness, disease and want.” 131
-“ The towns have had to receive from year to year what was deemed to be the
-surplus labour of the rural division;”132 and then people still wonder “there is still
-a surplus of labour in the towns and villages, and either a scarcity or a threatened
-scarcity in some of the country divisions.”133 The truth is that this want only
-becomes perceptible “in harvest-time, or during spring, or at such times as
-agricultural operations are carried on with activity; at other periods of the year
-many hands are idle;”134 that “from the digging out of the main crop of potatoes in
-October until the early spring following ... there is no employment for them;”
-135and further, that during the active times they “are subject to broken days and to
-all kinds of interruptions.”136
-These results of the agricultural revolution – i.e., the change of arable into pasture land, the use of
-machinery, the most rigorous economy of labour, &c., are still further aggravated by the model
-landlords, who, instead of spending their rents in other countries, condescend to live in Ireland on
-their demesnes. In order that the law of supply and demand may not be broken, these gentlemen
-draw their
-“labour-supply ... chiefly from their small tenants, who are obliged to attend when
-required to do the landlord’s work, at rates of wages, in many instances,
-considerably under the current rates paid to ordinary labourers, and without regard
-to the inconvenience or loss to the tenant of being obliged to neglect his own
-business at critical periods of sowing or reaping.” 137
-487 Chapter 25
-The uncertainty and irregularity of employment, the constant return and long duration of gluts of
-labour, all these symptoms of a relative surplus population, figure therefore in the reports of the
-Poor Law administration, as so many hardships of the agricultural proletariat. It will be
-remembered that we met, in the English agricultural proletariat, with a similar spectacle. But the
-difference is that in England, an industrial country, the industrial reserve recruits itself from the
-country districts, whilst in Ireland, an agricultural country, the agricultural reserve recruits itself
-from the towns, the cities of refuge of the expelled agricultural labourers. In the former, the
-supernumeraries of agriculture are transformed into factory operatives; in the latter, those forced
-into the towns, whilst at the same time they press on the wages in towns, remain agricultural
-labourers, and are constantly sent back to the country districts in search of work.
-The official inspectors sum up the material condition of the agricultural labourer as follows:
-“Though living with the strictest frugality, his own wages are barely sufficient to
-provide food for an ordinary family and pay his rent” and he depends upon other
-sources for the means of clothing himself, his wife, and children.... The
-atmosphere of these cabins, combined with the other privations they are subjected
-to, has made this class particularly susceptible to low fever and pulmonary
-consumption.” 138
-After this, it is no wonder that, according to the unanimous testimony of the inspectors, a sombre
-discontent runs through the ranks of this class, that they long for the return of the past, loathe the
-present, despair of the future, give themselves up “to the evil influence of agitators,” and have
-only one fixed idea, to emigrate to America. This is the land of Cockaigne, into which the great
-Malthusian panacea, depopulation, has transformed green Erin.
-What a happy life the Irish factory operative leads one example will show:
-“On my recent visit to the North of Ireland,” says the English Factory Inspector,
-Robert Baker, “I met with the following evidence of effort in an Irish skilled
-workman to afford education to his children; and I give his evidence verbatim, as I
-took it from his mouth. That he was a skilled factory hand, may be understood
-when I say that he was employed on goods for the Manchester market. ‘Johnson.
-– I am a beetler and work from 6 in the morning till 11 at night, from Monday to
-Friday. Saturday we leave off at 6 p. m., and get three hours of it (for meals and
-rest). I have five children in all. For this work I get 10s. 6d. a week; my wife
-works here also, and gets 5s. a week. The oldest girl who is 12, minds the house.
-She is also cook, and all the servant we have. She gets the young ones ready for
-school. A girl going past the house wakes me at half past five in the morning. My
-wife gets up and goes along with me. We get nothing (to eat) before we come to
-work. The child of 12 takes care of the little children all the day, and we get
-nothing till breakfast at eight. At eight we go home. We get tea once a week; at
-other times we get stirabout, sometimes of oat-meal, sometimes of Indian meal, as
-we are able to get it. In the winter we get a little sugar and water to our Indian
-meal. In the summer we get a few potatoes, planting a small patch ourselves; and
-when they are done we get back to stirabout. Sometimes we get a little milk as it
-may be. So we go on from day to day, Sunday and week day, always the same the
-year round. I am always very much tired when I have done at night. We may see a
-bit of flesh meat sometimes, but very seldom. Three of our children attend school,
-for whom we pay 1d. a week a head. Our rent is 9d. a week. Peat for firing costs
-1s. 6d. a fortnight at the very lowest.’” 139
-Such are Irish wages, such is Irish life!
-488 Chapter 25
-In fact the misery of Ireland is again the topic of the day in England. At the end of 1866 and the
-beginning of 1867, one of the Irish land magnates, Lord Dufferin, set about its solution in The
-Times. “Wie menschlich von solch grossem Herrn!”
-From Table E. we saw that, during 1864, of £4,368,610 of total profits, three surplus-value
-makers pocketed only £262,819; that in 1865, however, out of £4,669,979 total profits, the same
-three virtuosi of “abstinence” pocketed £274,528; in 1864, 26 surplus-value makers reached to
-£646,377; in 1865, 28 surplus-value makers reached to £736,448; in 1864, 121 surplus-value
-makers, £1,076,912; in 1865, 150 surplus-value makers, £1,320,906; in 1864, 1,131 surplus-value
-makers £2,150,818, nearly half of the total annual profit; in 1865, 1,194 surplus-value makers,
-£2,418,833, more than half of the total annual profit. But the lion’s share, which an inconceivably
-small number of land magnates in England, Scotland and Ireland swallow up of the yearly
-national rental, is so monstrous that the wisdom of the English State does not think fit to afford
-the same statistical materials about the distribution of rents as about the distribution of profits.
-Lord Dufferin is one of those land magnates. That rent-rolls and profits can ever be “excessive,”
-or that their plethora is in any way connected with plethora of the people’s misery is, of course,
-an idea as “disreputable” as “unsound.” He keeps to facts. The fact is that, as the Irish population
-diminishes, the Irish rent-rolls swell; that depopulation benefits the landlords, therefore also
-benefits the soil, and, therefore, the people, that mere accessory of the soil. He declares, therefore,
-that Ireland is still over-populated, and the stream of emigration still flows too lazily. To be
-perfectly happy, Ireland must get rid of at least one-third of a million of labouring men. Let no
-man imagine that this lord, poetic into the bargain, is a physician of the school of Sangrado, who
-as often as he did not find his patient better, ordered phlebotomy and again phlebotomy, until the
-patient lost his sickness at the same time as his blood. Lord Dufferin demands a new blood-letting
-of one-third of a million only, instead of about two millions; in fact, without the getting rid of
-these, the millennium in Erin is not to be. The proof is easily given.
-NUMBER AND EXTENT OF FARMS IN IRELAND IN 1864 140
-No. Acres
-(1) Farms not
-over 1 acre. 48,653 25,394
-(2) Farms over 1,
-not over 5 acres. 82,037 288,916
-(3) Farms over 5,
-not over 15 acres. 176,368 1,836,310
-(4) Farms over 15,
-not over 30 acres. 136,578 3,051,343
-(5) Farms over 30,
-not over 50 acres. 71,961 2,906,274
-(6) Farms over 50,
-not over 100 acres. 54,247 3,983,880
-(7) Farms over
-100 acres. 31,927 8,227,807
-(8) TOTAL AREA. – 26,319,924
-Centralisation has from 1851 to 1861 destroyed principally farms of the first three categories,
-under 1 and not over 15 acres. These above all must disappear. This gives 307,058
-489 Chapter 25
-“supernumerary” farmers, and reckoning the families the low average of 4 persons, 1,228,232
-persons. On the extravagant supposition that, after the agricultural revolution is complete one-
-fourth of these are again absorbable, there remain for emigration 921,174 persons. Categories 4,
-5, 6, of over 15 and not over 100 acres, are, as was known long since in England, too small for
-capitalistic cultivation of corn, and for sheep-breeding are almost vanishing quantities. On the
-same supposition as before, therefore, there are further 788,761 persons to emigrate; total,
-1,709,532. And as l’appétit vient en mangeant, Rentroll’s eyes will soon discover that Ireland,
-with 3½ millions, is still always miserable, and miserable because she is overpopulated.
-Therefore her depopulation must go yet further, that thus she may fulfil her true destiny, that of
-an English sheep-walk and cattle-pasture.” 141
-Like all good things in this bad world, this profitable method has its drawbacks. With the
-accumulation of rents in Ireland, the accumulation of the Irish in America keeps pace. The
-Irishman, banished by sheep and ox, re-appears on the other side of the ocean as a Fenian, and
-face to face with the old queen of the seas rises, threatening and more threatening, the young
-giant Republic:
-Acerba fata Romanos agunt
-Scelusque fraternae necis.
-[A cruel fate torments the Romans,
-and the crime of fratricide]
-1 Karl Marx, l. c., “A égalité d’oppression des masses, plus un pays a de prolétaires et plus il est
-riche.” (Colins, “L’Economie Politique. Source des Révolutions et des Utopies, prétendues
-Socialistes.” Paris, 1857, t. III., p. 331.) Our “prolétarian” is economically none other than the wage
-labourer, who produces and increases capital, and is thrown out on the streets, as soon as he is
-superfluous for the needs of aggrandisement of “Monsieur capital,” as Pecqueur calls this person.
-“The sickly proletarian of the primitive forest,” is a pretty Roscherian fancy. The primitive forester is
-owner of the primitive forest, and uses the primitive forest as his property with the freedom of an
-orang-outang. He is not, therefore, a proletarian. This would only be the case, if the primitive forest
-exploited him, instead of being exploited by him. As far as his health is concerned, such a man would
-well bear comparison, not only with the modern proletarian, but also with the syphilitic and scrofulous
-upper classes. But, no doubt, Herr Wilhelm Roscher, by “primitive forest” means his native heath of
-Lüneburg.
-2 John Bellers, l. c., p. 2.
-3 Bernard de Mandeville: “The Fable of the Bees,” 5th edition, London, 1728. Remarks, pp. 212, 213,
-328. “Temperate living and constant employment is the direct road, for the poor, to rational
-happiness” [by which he most probably means long working days and little means of subsistence],
-“and to riches and strength for the state” (viz., for the landlords, capitalists, and their political
-dignitaries and agents). (“An Essay on Trade and Commerce,” London, 1770, p. 54.)
-4 Eden should have asked, whose creatures then are “the civil institutions"? From his standpoint of
-juridical illusion, he does not regard the law as a product of the material relations of production, but
-conversely the relations of production as products of the law. Linguet overthrew Montesquieu’s
-illusory “Esprit des lois” with one word: “ L’esprit des lois, c’est la propriété.” [The spirit of laws is
-property]
-5 Eden, l. c., Vol. 1, book I., chapter 1, pp. 1, 2, and preface, p. xx.
-6 If the reader reminds me of Malthus, whose “Essay on Population” appeared in 1798, I remind him
-that this work in its first form is nothing more than a schoolboyish, superficial plagiary of De Foe, Sir
-James Steuart, Townsend, Franklin, Wallace, &c., and does not contain a single sentence thought out
-490 Chapter 25
-by himself. The great sensation this pamphlet caused, was due solely to party interest. The French
-Revolution had found passionate defenders in the United Kingdom; the “principle of population,”
-slowly worked out in the eighteenth century, and then, in the midst of a great social crisis, proclaimed
-with drums and trumpets as the infallible antidote to the teachings of Condorcet, &c., was greeted with
-jubilance by the English oligarchy as the great destroyer of all hankerings after human development.
-Malthus, hugely astonished at his success, gave himself to stuffing into his book materials
-superficially compiled, and adding to it new matter, not discovered but annexed by him. Note further:
-Although Malthus was a parson of the English State Church, he had taken the monastic vow of
-celibacy — one of the conditions of holding a Fellowship in Protestant Cambridge University: “Socios
-collegiorum maritos esse non permittimus, sed statim postquam quis uxorem duxerit socius collegii
-desinat esse.” (“Reports of Cambridge University Commission,” p. 172.) This circumstance
-favourably distinguishes Malthus from the other Protestant parsons, who have shuffled off the
-command enjoining celibacy of the priesthood and have taken, “Be fruitful and multiply,” as their
-special Biblical mission in such a degree that they generally contribute to the increase of population to
-a really unbecoming extent, whilst they preach at the same time to the labourers the “principle of
-population.” It is characteristic that the economic fall of man, the Adam’s apple, the urgent appetite,
-“the checks which tend to blunt the shafts of Cupid,” as Parson Townsend waggishly puts it, that this
-delicate question was and is monopolised by the Reverends of Protestant Theology, or rather of the
-Protestant Church. With the exception of the Venetian monk, Ortes, an original and clever writer,
-most of the population theory teachers are Protestant parsons. For instance, Bruckner, “Théorie du
-Système animal,” Leyde, 1767, in which the whole subject of the modern population theory is
-exhausted, and to which the passing quarrel between Quesnay and his pupil, the elder Mirabeau,
-furnished ideas on the same topic; then Parson Wallace, Parson Townsend, Parson Malthus and his
-pupil, the arch-Parson Thomas Chalmers, to say nothing of lesser reverend scribblers in this line.
-Originally, Political Economy was studied by philosophers like Hobbes, Locke, Hume; by
-businessmen and statesmen, like Thomas More, Temple, Sully, De Witt, North, Law, Vanderlint,
-Cantillon, Franklin; and especially, and with the greatest success, by medical men like Petty, Barbon,
-Mandeville, Quesnay. Even in the middle of the eighteenth century, the Rev. Mr. Tucker, a notable
-economist of his time, excused himself for meddling with the things of Mammon. Later on, and in
-truth with this very “Principle of population,” struck the hour of the Protestant parsons. Petty, who
-regarded the population as the basis of wealth, and was, like Adam Smith, an outspoken foe to
-parsons, says, as if he had a presentiment of their bungling interference, “that Religion best flourishes
-when the Priests are most mortified, as was before said of the Law, which best flourisheth when
-lawyers have least to do.” He advises the Protestant priests, therefore, if they, once for all, will not
-follow the Apostle Paul and “mortify” themselves by celibacy, “not to breed more Churchmen than
-the Benefices, as they now stand shared out, will receive, that is to say, if there be places for about
-twelve thousand in England and Wales, it will not be safe to breed up 24,000 ministers, for then the
-twelve thousand which are unprovided for, will seek ways how to get themselves a livelihood, which
-they cannot do more easily than by persuading the people that the twelve thousand incumbents do
-poison or starve their souls, and misguide them in their way to Heaven.” (Petty: “A Treatise of Taxes
-and Contributions,” London, 1667, p. 57.) Adam Smith’s position with the Protestant priesthood of his
-time is shown by the following. In “A Letter to A. Smith, L.L.D. On the Life, Death, and Philosophy
-of his Friend, David Hume. By one of the People called Christians,” 4th Edition, Oxford, 1784, Dr.
-Horne, Bishop of Norwich, reproves Adam Smith, because in a published letter to Mr. Strahan, he
-“embalmed his friend David” (sc. Hume); because he told the world how “Hume amused himself on
-his deathbed with Lucian and Whist,” and because he even had the impudence to write of Hume: “I
-have always considered him, both in his life-time and since his death, as approaching as nearly to the
-idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man, as, perhaps, the nature of human frailty will permit.” The
-bishop cries out, in a passion: “Is it right in you, Sir, to hold up to our view as ‘perfectly wise and
-491 Chapter 25
-virtuous,’ the character and conduct of one, who seems to have been possessed with an incurable
-antipathy to all that is called Religion; and who strained every nerve to explode, suppress and extirpate
-the spirit of it among men, that its very name, if he could effect it, might no more be had in
-remembrance?” (l. c., p. 8.) “But let not the lovers of truth be discouraged. Atheism cannot be of long
-continuance.” (P. 17.) Adam Smith, “had the atrocious wickedness to propagate atheism through the
-land (viz., by his “Theory of Moral Sentiments”). Upon the whole, Doctor, your meaning is good; but
-I think you will not succeed this time. You would persuade us, by the example of David Hume, Esq.,
-that atheism is the only cordial for low spirits, and the proper antidote against the fear of death.... You
-may smile over Babylon in ruins and congratulate the hardened Pharaoh on his overthrow in the Red
-Sea.” (l. c., pp. 21, 22.) One orthodox individual, amongst Adam Smith’s college friends, writes after
-his death: “Smith’s well-placed affection for Hume ... hindered him from being a Christian.... When
-he met with honest men whom he liked ... he would believe almost anything they said. Had he been a
-friend of the worthy ingenious Horrox he would have believed that the moon some times disappeared
-in a clear sky without the interposition of a cloud.... He approached to republicanism in his political
-principles.” (“The Bee.” By James Anderson, 18 Vols., Vol. 3, pp. 166, 165, Edinburgh, 1791-93.)
-Parson Thomas Chalmers has his suspicions as to Adam Smith having invented the category of
-“unproductive labourers,” solely for the Protestant parsons, in spite of their blessed work in the
-vineyard of the Lord.
-7 “The limit, however, to the employment of both the operative and the labourer is the same; namely,
-the possibility of the employer realising a profit on the produce of their industry. If the rate of wages is
-such as to reduce the master’s gains below the average profit of capital, he will cease to employ them,
-or he will only employ them on condition of submission to a reduction of wages.” (John Wade, l. c., p.
-241.)
-8 Note by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism to the Russian edition: The MS in the first case says
-“little” and in the second case “much”; the correction has been introduced according to the authorised
-French translation.
-9 Cf. Karl Marx: “Zur Kritik der Politischen Oekonomie,” pp. 166, seq.
-10 “If we now return to our first inquiry, wherein it was shown that capital itself is only the result of
-human labour... it seems quite incomprehensible that man can have fallen under the domination of
-capital, his own product; can be subordinated to it; and as in reality this is beyond dispute the case,
-involuntarily the question arises: How has the labourer been able to pass from being master of capital
-— as its creator — to being its slave?” (Von Thünen, “Der isolierte Staat” Part ii., Section ii.,
-Rostock, 1863, pp. 5, 6.) It is Thünen’s merit to have asked this question. His answer is simply
-childish.
-11 Adam Smith, “Enquiry into the Nature of ...”, Volume I.
-12 Note in the 4th German edition. — The latest English and American “trusts” are already striving to
-attain this goal by attempting to unite at least all the large-scale concerns in one branch of industry
-into one great joint-stock company with a practical monopoly. F. E.
-13 Note in the 3rd German edition. — In Marx’s copy there is here the marginal note: “Here note for
-working out later; if the extension is only quantitative, then for a greater and a smaller capital in the
-same branch of business the profits are as the magnitudes of the capitals advanced. If the quantitative
-extension induces qualitative change, then the rate of profit on the larger capital rises simultaneously.”
-F. E.
-14 The census of England and Wales shows: all persons employed in agriculture (landlords, farmers,
-gardeners, shepherds, &c., included): 1851, 2,011,447; 1861, 1,924,110. Fall, 87,337. Worsted
-manufacture: 1851, 102,714 persons; 1861, 79,242. Silk weaving: 1851, 111,940; 1861, 101,678.
-Calico-printing: 1851, 12,098; 1861, 12,556. A small rise that, in the face of the enormous extension
-492 Chapter 25
-of this industry and implying a great fall proportionally in the number of labourers employed. Hat-
-making: 1851, 15,957; 1861, 13,814. Straw-hat and bonnet-making: 1851, 20,393; 1861, 18,176.
-Malting: 1851, 10,566; 1861, 10,677. Chandlery, 1851, 4,949; 1861, 4,686. This fall is due, besides
-other causes, to the increase in lighting by gas. Comb-making: 1851, 2,038; 1861, 1,478. Sawyers:
-1851, 30,552; 1861, 31,647 — a small rise in consequence of the increase of sawing-machines. Nail-
-making: 1851, 26,940; 1861, 26,130 — fall in consequence of the competition of machinery. Tin and
-copper-mining: 1851, 31,360; 1861, 32,041. On the other hand: Cotton-spinning and weaving: 1851,
-371,777; 1861, 456,646. Coal-mining: 1851, 183,389, 1861, 246,613, “The increase of labourers is
-generally greatest, since 1851, in such branches of industry in which machinery has not up to the
-present been employed with success.” (Census of England and Wales for 1861. Vol. III. London,
-1863, p. 36.)
-15 Added in the 4th German edition. — The law of progressive diminution of the relative magnitude of
-variable capital and its effect on the condition of the class of wage workers is conjectured rather than
-understood by some of the prominent economists of the classical school. The greatest service was
-rendered here by John Barton, although he, like all the rest, lumps together constant and fixed capital,
-variable and circulating capital. He says:
-“The demand for labour depends on the increase of circulating, and not of fixed capital. Were it true
-that the proportion between these two sorts of capital is the same at all times, and in all circumstances,
-then, indeed, it follows that the number of labourers employed is in proportion to the wealth of the
-state. But such a proposition has not the semblance of probability. As arts are cultivated, and
-civilisation is extended, fixed capital bears a larger and larger proportion to circulating capital. The
-amount of fixed capital employed in the production of a piece of British muslin is at least a hundred,
-probably a thousand times greater than that employed in a similar piece of Indian muslin. And the
-proportion of circulating capital is a hundred or thousand times less ... the whole of the annual savings,
-added to the fixed capital, would have no effect in increasing the demand for labour.” (John Barton,
-“Observations on the Circumstances which Influence the Condition of the Labouring Classes of
-Society.” London, 1817, pp. 16, 17.) “The same cause which may increase the net revenue of the
-country may at the same time render the population redundant, and deteriorate the condition of the
-labourer.” (Ricardo, l. c., p. 469.) With increase of capital, “the demand [for labour] will be in a
-diminishing ratio.” (Ibid., p. 480, Note.) “The amount of capital devoted to the maintenance of labour
-may vary, independently of any changes in the whole amount of capital.... Great fluctuations in the
-amount of employment, and great suffering may become more frequent as capital itself becomes more
-plentiful.” (Richard Jones, “An Introductory Lecture on Pol. Econ.,” Lond. 1833, p. 13) “Demand [for
-labour] will rise ... not in proportion to the accumulation of the general capital. ... Every augmentation,
-therefore, in the national stock destined for reproduction, comes, in the progress of society, to have
-less and less influence upon the condition of the labourer.” (Ramsay, l. c., pp. 90, 91.)
-16 H. Merivale. “Lectures on Colonisation and Colonies,” 1841, Vol. I , p. 146.
-17 Malthus, “Principles of Political Economy,” pp. 215, 319, 320. In this work, Malthus finally
-discovers, with the help of Sismondi, the beautiful Trinity of capitalistic production: over-production,
-over-population, over-consumption — three very delicate monsters, indeed. Cf. F. Engels, “Umrisse
-zu einer Kritik der Nationalökonomie,” l. c., p, 107, et seq.
-18 Harriet Martineau, “A Manchester Strike,” 1832, p. 101.
-19 Even in the cotton famine of 1863 we find, in a pamphlet of the operative cotton-spinners of
-Blackburn, fierce denunciations of overwork, which, in consequence of the Factory Acts, of course
-only affected adult male labourers. “The adult operatives at this mill have been asked to work from 12
-to 13 hours per day, while there are hundreds who are compelled to be idle who would willingly work
-partial time, in order to maintain their families and save their brethren from a premature grave through
-being overworked.... We,” it goes on to say, “would ask if the practice of working overtime by a
-493 Chapter 25
-number of hands, is likely to create a good feeling between masters and servants. Those who are
-worked overtime feel the injustice equally with those who are condemned to forced idleness. There is
-in the district almost sufficient work to give to all partial employment if fairly distributed. We are only
-asking what is right in requesting the masters generally to pursue a system of short hours, particularly
-until a better state of things begins to dawn upon us, rather than to work a portion of the hands
-overtime, while others, for want of work, are compelled to exist upon charity.” (“Reports of Insp. of
-Fact., Oct. 31, 1863,” p. 8.) The author of the “Essay on Trade and Commerce” grasps the effect of a
-relative surplus population on the employed labourers with his usual unerring bourgeois instinct.
-“Another cause of idleness in this kingdom is the want of a sufficient number of labouring hands ....
-Whenever from an extraordinary demand for manufactures, labour grows scarce, the labourers feel
-their own consequence, and will make their masters feel it likewise — it is amazing; but so depraved
-are the dispositions of these people, that in such cases a set of workmen have combined to distress the
-employer by idling a whole day together.” (“Essay, &c.,” pp. 27, 28.) The fellows in fact were
-hankering after a rise in wages.
-20 Economist, Jan. 21. 1860.
-21 Whilst during the last six months of 1866, 80-90,000 working people in London were thrown out of
-work, the Factory Report for that same half year says: “It does not appear absolutely true to say that
-demand will always produce supply just at the moment when it is needed. It has not done so with
-labour, for much machinery has been idle last year for want of hands.” (“Rep. of Insp. of Fact., 31st
-Oct., 1866,” p. 81.)
-22 Opening address to the Sanitary Conference, Birmingham, January 15th, 1875, by J. Chamberlain,
-Mayor of the town, now (1883) President of the Board of Trade.
-23 781 towns given in the census for 1861 for England and Wales “contained 10,960,998 inhabitants,
-while the villages and country parishes contained 9,105,226. In 1851, 580 towns were distinguished,
-and the population in them and in the surrounding country was nearly equal. But while in the
-subsequent ten years the population in the villages and the country increased half a million, the
-population in the 580 towns increased by a million and a half (1,554,067). The increase of the
-population of the country parishes is 6.5 per cent., and of the towns 17.3 per cent. The difference in
-the rates of increase is due to the migration from country to town. Three-fourths of the total increase
-of population has taken place in the towns.” (“Census. &c.,” pp. 11 and 12.)
-24 “Poverty seems favourable to generation.” (A. Smith.) This is even a specially wise arrangement of
-God, according to the gallant and witty Abbé Galiani “Iddio af che gli uomini che esercitano mestieri
-di prima utilità nascono abbondantemente.” (Galiani, l. c., p. 78.) [God ordains that men who carry on
-trades of primary utility are born in abundance] “Misery up to the extreme point of famine and
-pestilence, instead of checking, tends to increase population.” (S. Laing, “National Distress,” 1844, p.
-69.) After Laing has illustrated this by statistics, he continues: “If the people were all in easy
-circumstances, the world would soon be depopulated.”
-25 “De jour en jour il devient donc plus clair que les rapports de production dans lesquels se meut la
-bourgeoisie n’ont pas un caractère un, un caractère simple, mais un caractère de duplicité; que dans les
-mêmes rapports dans lesquels se produit la richesse, la misère se produit aussi; que dans les mêmes
-rapports dans lesquels il y a développement des forces productives, il y a une force productive de
-répression; que ces rapports ne produisent la richesse bourgeoise, c’est-à-dire la richesse de la classe
-bourgeoise, qu’en anéantissant continuellement la richesse des membres intégrants de cette classe et
-en produisant un prolétariat toujours croissant.” [From day to day it thus becomes clearer that the
-production relations in which the bourgeoisie moves have not a simple, uniform character, but a dual
-character; that in the selfsame relations in which wealth is produced, poverty is produced also; that in
-the selfsame relations in which there is a development of productive forces, there is also a force
-producing repression; that there relations produce bourgeois wealth, i.e., the wealth of the bourgeois
-494 Chapter 25
-class, only by continually annihilating the wealth of the individual members of this class and by
-producing an evergrowing proletariat] (Karl Marx: “Misère de la Philosophie,” p. 116.)
-26 G. Ortes: “Delia Economia Nazionale libri sei, 1777,” in Custodi, Parte Moderna, t. xxi, pp. 6, 9, 22,
-25, etc. Ortes says, l. c., p. 32: “In luoco di progettar sistemi inutili per la felicità de’popoli, mi
-limiterò a investigare la regione della loro infelicità.” [Instead of projecting useless systems for
-achieving the happiness of people, I shall limit myself to investigating the reasons for their
-unhappiness]
-27 “A Dissertation on the Poor Laws. By a Well-wisher of Mankind. (The Rev. J. Townsend) 1786,”
-republished Lond. 1817, pp. 15, 39, 41. This “delicate” parson, from whose work just quoted, as well
-as from his “Journey through Spain,” Malthus often copies whole pages, himself borrowed the greater
-part of his doctrine from Sir James Steuart, whom he however alters in the borrowing. E.g., when
-Steuart says: “Here, in slavery, was a forcible method of making mankind diligent,” [for the non-
-workers] ... “Men were then forced to work” [i.e.,to work gratis for others], “because they were slaves
-of others; men are now forced to work” [i.e., to work gratis for non-workers] “because they are the
-slaves of their necessities,” he does not thence conclude, like the fat holder of benefices, that the wage
-labourer must always go fasting. He wishes, on the contrary, to increase their wants and to make the
-increasing number of their wants a stimulus to their labour for the “more delicate.”
-28 Storch, l. c., t. iii, p. 223.
-29 Sismondi, l. c., pp. 79, 80, 85.
-30 Destutt de Tracy, l. c., p. 231: “Les nations pauvres, c’est là où le peuple est à son aise; et les
-nations riches, c’est là où il est ordinairement pauvre.” [The poor nations are those where the people
-are comfortably off; and the rich nations, those where the people are generally poor]
-31 “Tenth Report of the Commissioners of H. M. Inland Revenue.” Lond., 1866. p. 38.
-32 lbidem.
-33 These figures are sufficient for comparison, but, taken absolutely, are false, since, perhaps,
-£100,000,000 of income are annually not declared. The complaints of the Inland Revenue
-Commissioners of systematic fraud, especially on the part of the commercial and industrial classes,
-are repeated in each of their reports. So e.g., “A Joint-stock company returns £6,000 as assessable
-profits, the surveyor raises the amount to £88,000, and upon that sum duty is ultimately paid. Another
-company which returns £190,000 is finally compelled to admit that the true return should be
-£250,000.” (Ibid., p, 42.)
-34 “Census, &c.,” l. c., p. 29. John Bright’s assertion that 150 landlords own half of England, and 12
-half the Scotch soil, has never been refuted.
-35 “Fourth Report, &c., of Inland Revenue.” Lond., 1860, p. 17.
-36 hese are the net incomes after certain legally authorised abatements.
-37 At this moment, March, 1867, the Indian and Chinese market is again overstocked by the
-consignments of the British cotton manufacturers. In 1866 a reduction in wages of 5 per cent. took
-place amongst the cotton operatives. In 1867, as consequence of a similar operation, there was a strike
-of 20,000 men at Preston. [Added in the 4th German edition. — That was the prelude to the crisis
-which broke out immediately afterwards. — F. E.]
-38 “Census, &c.,” l. c., P. 11.
-39 Gladstone in the House of Commons, Feb. 13th, 1843. Times, Feb. 14th, 1843 — “It is one of the
-most melancholy features in the social state of this country that we see, beyond the possibility of
-denial, that while there is at this moment a decrease in the consuming powers of the people, an
-increase of the pressure of privations and distress; there is at the same time a constant accumulation of
-495 Chapter 25
-wealth in the upper classes, an increase of the luxuriousness of their habits, and of their means of
-enjoyment.” (Hansard, 13th Feb.)
-40 Gladstone in the House of Commons, April 16th, 1863. Morning Star, April 17th.
-41 See the official accounts in the Blue book: “Miscellaneous Statistics of the United Kingdom,” Part
-vi., London, 1866, pp. 260-273, passim. Instead of the statistics of orphan asylums, &c., the
-declamations of the ministerial journals in recommending dowries for the Royal children might also
-serve. The greater dearness of the means of subsistence is never forgotten there.
-42 Gladstone, House of Commons, 7th April, 1864. — “The Hansard version runs: ‘Again, and yet
-more at large — what is human life, but, in the majority of cases, a struggle for existence.’ The
-continual crying contradictions in Gladstone’s Budget speeches of 1863 and 1864 were characterised
-by an English writer by the following quotation from Boileau:
-“Voilà l’homme en effet. Il va du blanc au noir,
-Il condamne au matin ses sentiments du soir.
-Importun à tout autre, à soi-même incommode,
-Il change à tout moment d’esprit comme de mode.”
-[Such is the man: he goes from black to white. / He condemns in the morning what he felt in the
-evening. / A nuisance to everyone else, and an inconvenience to himself, / he changes his way of
-thinking as easily as he changes his way of dressing]
-(“The Theory of Exchanges, &c.,” London, 1864, p. 135.)
-43 H. Fawcett, l. c., pp. 67-82. As to the increasing dependence of labourers on the retail shopkeepers,
-this is the consequence of the frequent oscillations and interruptions of their employment.
-44 Wales here is always included in England.
-45 A peculiar light is thrown on the advance made since the time of Adam Smith, by the fact that by
-him the word “workhouse” is still occasionally used as synonymous with “manufactory”; e.g., the
-opening of his chapter on the division of labour; “those employed in every different branch of the
-work can often be collected into the same workhouse.”
-46 “Public Health. Sixth Report, 1864,” p. 13.
-47 l. c., p. 17.
-48 l. c., p. 13.
-49 l. c., Appendix, p. 232.
-50 l. c., pp. 232, 233.
-51 l. c., pp. 14, 15.
-52 “In no particular have the rights of persons been so avowedly and shamefully sacrificed to the rights
-of property as in regard to the lodging of the labouring class. Every large town may be looked upon as
-a place of human sacrifice, a shrine where thousands pass yearly through the fire as offerings to the
-moloch of avarice,” S. Laing, l. c., p. 150.
-53 “Public Health, Eighth Report. 1866.” p. 14, note.
-54 . c., p. 89. With reference to the children in these colonies, Dr. Hunter says: “People are not now
-alive to tell us how children were brought up before this age of dense agglomerations of poor began,
-and he would be a rash prophet who should tell us what future behaviour is to be expected from the
-present growth of children, who, under circumstances probably never before paralleled in this country,
-are now completing their education for future practice, as ’dangerous classes’ by sitting up half the
-night with persons of every age, half naked, drunken, obscene, and quarrelsome.” (l. c., p. 56.)
-55 l. c., p. 62.
-56 “Report of the Officer of Health of St. Martins-in-the-Fields, 1865.”
-496 Chapter 25
-57 “Public Health, Eighth Report, 1866,” p. 91.
-58 l. c., p. 88.
-59 l. c., p. 88.
-60 l. c., p. 89.
-61 l. c., p. 55 and 56.
-62 l. c., p. 149.
-63 l. c., p. 50.
-64
-COLLECTING AGENTS LIST (BRADFORD)HousesVulcan Street, No. 1221 Room16
-personsLumiev Street, No. 131 Room11 personsBower Street, No. 411 Room11 personsPortland
-Street. No. 1121 Room10 personsHardy Street, No. 171 Room10 personsNorth Street, No. 181
-Room16 personsNorth Street, No. 171 Room13 personsWymer Street, No. 191 Room8 adultsJowett
-Street, No. 561 Room12 personsGeorge Street, No. 1501 Room3 familiesRifle Court Marygate, No.
-111 Room11 personsMarshall Street, No. 281 Room10 personsMarshall Street, No. 491 Room3
-familiesGeorge Street, No. 1281 Room18 personsGeorge Street, No. 1301 Room16 personsEdward
-Street, No. 41 Room17 personsGeorge Street, No. 491 Room2 familiesYork Street, No. 341 Room2
-familiesSalt Pie Street (bottom)1 Room26 personsCellarsRegent Square1 cellar8 personsAcre Street1
-cellar7 persons33 Roberts Court1 cellar7 personsBack Pratt Street used as a brazier’s shop1 cellar7
-persons27 Ebenezer Street1 cellar6 personsl.c. p. 111 (no male over 18)
-65 l. c., p. 114.
-66 l. c., p. 50.
-67 “Public Health. Seventh Report. 1865,” p. 18.
-68 l. c., p. 165.
-69 l. c., p. 18, Note. — The Relieving Officer of the Chapel-en-le-Frith Union reported to the Registar-
-General as follows: — “At Doveholes, a number of small excavations have been made into a large
-hillock of lime ashes (the refuse of lime-kilns), and which are used as dwellings, and occupied by
-labourers and others employed in the construction of a railway now in course of construction through
-that neighbourhood. The excavations are small and damp, and have no drains or privies about them,
-and not the slightest means of ventilation except up a hole pulled through the top, and used for a
-chimney. In consequence of this defect, small-pox has been raging for some time, and some deaths
-[amongst the troglodytes] have been caused by it.” (l. c., note 2.)
-70 The details given at the end of Part IV. refer especially to the labourers in coal mines. On the still
-worse condition in metal mines, see the very conscientious Report of the Royal Commission of 1864.
-71 l. c., pp. 180, 182.
-72 l. c., pp. 515, 517.
-73 l. c., p. 16.
-74 “Wholesale starvation of the London Poor.... Within the last few days the walls of London have
-been placarded with large posters, bearing the following remarkable announcement: — ‘Fat oxen!
-Starving men! The fat oxen from their palace of glass have gone to feed the rich in their luxurious
-abode, while the starving men are left to rot and die in their wretched dens.’ The placards bearing
-these ominous words are put up at certain intervals. No sooner has one set been defaced or covered
-over, than a fresh set is placarded in the former, or some equally public place.... This ... reminds one of
-the secret revolutionary associations which prepared the French people for the events of 1789.... At
-this moment, while English workmen with their wives and children are dying of cold and hunger,
-497 Chapter 25
-there are millions of English gold — the produce of English labour — being invested in Russian,
-Spanish, Italian, and other foreign enterprises.” —Reynolds’ Newspaper, January 20th, 1867.
-75 James E. Thorold Rogers. (Prof. of Polit. Econ. in the University of Oxford.) “A History of
-Agriculture and Prices in England.” Oxford, 1866, v. 1, p. 690. This work, the fruit of patient and
-diligent labour, contains in the two volumes that have so far appeared, only the period from 1259 to
-1400. The second volume contains simply statistics. It is the first authentic “History of Prices” of the
-time that we possess.
-76 “Reasons for the Late Increase of the Poor-Rates: or a comparative view of the prices of labour and
-provisions.” Lond., 1777, pp. 5, 11.
-77 Dr. Richard Price: “Observations on Reversionary Payments,” 6th Ed. By W. Morgan, Lond., 1803,
-v. II., pp. 158, 159. Price remarks on p. 159: “The nominal price of day-labour is at present no more
-than about four times, or, at most, five times higher than it was in the year 1514. But the price of corn
-is seven times, and of flesh-meat and raiment about fifteen times higher. So far, therefore, has the
-price of labour been even from advancing in proportion to the increase in the expenses of living, that it
-does not appear that it bears now half the proportion to those expenses that it did bear.”
-78 Barton, l. c., p. 26. For the end of the 18th century cf. Eden, l. c.
-79 Parry, l. c., p. 86.
-80 ibid., p. 213.
-81 S. Laing, l. c., p. 62.
-82 “England and America.” Lond., 1833, Vol. 1, p. 47.
-83 London Economist, May 29th, 1845, p. 290.
-84 The landed aristocracy advanced themselves to this end, of course per Parliament, funds from the
-State Treasury, at a very low rate of interest, which the farmers have to make good at a much higher
-rate.
-85 The decrease of the middle-class farmers can be seen especially in the census category: “Farmer’s
-son, grandson, brother, nephew, daughter, granddaughter, sister, niece"; in a word, the members of his
-own family, employed by the farmer. This category numbered, in 1851, 216,851 persons; in 1861,
-only 176,151. From 1851 to 1871, the farms under 20 acres fell by more than 900 in number; those
-between 50 and 75 acres fell from 8,253 to 6,370; the same thing occurred with all other farms under
-100 acres. On the other hand, during the same twenty years, the number of large farms increased;
-those of 300-500 acres rose from 7,771 to 8,410, those of more than 500 acres from 2,755 to 3,914,
-those of more than 1,000 acres from 492 to 582.
-86 The number of shepherds increased from 12,517 to 25,559.
-87 Census, l. c., p. 36.
-88 Rogers, l. c., p. 693, p. 10. Mr. Rogers belongs to the Liberal School, is a personal friend of Cobden
-and Bright, and therefore no laudator temporis acti.
-89 “Public Health. Seventh Report,” 1865, p. 242. It is therefore nothing unusual either for the landlord
-to raise a labourer’s rent as soon as he hears that he is earning a little more, or for the farmer to lower
-the wage of the labourer, “because his wife has found a trade,” l. c.
-90 l. c., p. 135.
-91 l. c., p. 134.
-92 “Report of the Commissioners ... relating to Transportation and Penal Servitude,” Lond., 1863, pp.
-42, 50.
-93 l. c., p. 77. “Memorandum by the Lord Chief Justice.”
-498 Chapter 25
-94 l. c., Vol. II, Minutes of Evidence.
-95 l. c., Vol. 1. Appendix, p. 280.
-96 l. c., pp. 274, 275.
-97 “Public Health, Sixth Report,” 1864, pp. 238, 249, 261, 262.
-98 l. c., p. 262.
-99 l. c., p. 17. The English agricultural labourer receives only 1/4 as much milk, and ½ as much bread
-as the Irish. Arthur Young in his “Tour in Ireland,” at the beginning of this century, already noticed
-the better nourishment of the latter. The reason is simply this, that the poor Irish farmer is
-incomparably more humane than the rich English. As regards Wales, that which is said in the text
-holds only for the southwest. All the doctors there agree that the increase of the death-rate through
-tuberculosis, scrofula, etc., increases in intensity with the deterioration of the physical condition of the
-population, and all ascribe this deterioration to poverty. “His (the farm labourer’s) keep is reckoned at
-about five pence a day, but in many districts it was said to be of much less cost to the farmer” [himself
-very poor].... “A morsel of the salt meat or bacon, ... salted and dried to the texture of mahogany, and
-hardly worth the difficult process of assimilation ... is used to flavour a large quantity of broth or
-gruel, of meal and leeks, and day after day this is the labourer’s dinner.” The advance of industry
-resulted for him, in this harsh and damp climate, in “the abandonment of the solid homespun clothing
-in favour of the cheap and so-called cotton goods,” and of stronger drinks for so-called tea. “The
-agriculturist, after several hours’ exposure to wind and rain, pins his cottage to sit by a fire of peat or
-of balls of clay and small coal kneaded together, from which volumes of carbonic and sulphurous
-acids are poured forth. His walls are of mud and stones, his floor the bare earth which was there before
-the hut was built, his roof a mass of loose and sodden thatch. Every crevice is topped to maintain
-warmth, and in an atmosphere of diabolic odour, with a mud floor, with his only clothes drying on his
-back, he often sups and sleeps with his wife and children. Obstetricians who have passed parts of the
-night in such cabins have described how they found their feet sinking in the mud of the floor, and they
-were forced (easy task) to drill a hole through the wall to effect a little private respiration. It was
-attested by numerous witnesses in various grades of life, that to these insanitary influences, and many
-more, the underfed peasant was nightly exposed, and of the result, a debilitated and scrofulous people,
-there was no want of evidence.... The statements of the relieving officers of Carmarthenshire and
-Cardiganshire show in a striking way the same state of things. There is besides “a plague more
-horrible still, the great number of idiots.” Now a word on the climatic conditions. “A strong south-
-west wind blows over the whole country for 8 or 9 months in the year, bringing with it torrents of rain,
-which discharge principally upon the western slopes of the hills. Trees are rare, except in sheltered
-places, and where not protected, are blown out of all shape. The cottages generally crouch under some
-bank, or often in a ravine or quarry, and none but the smallest sheep and native cattle can live on the
-pastures.... The young people migrate to the eastern mining districts of Glamorgan and Monmouth.
-Carmarthenshire is the breeding ground of the mining population and their hospital. The population
-can therefore barely maintain its numbers.” Thus in Cardiganshire:
-18511861Males45,15544,446Females52,45952,95597,61497,401Dr. Hunter’s Report in “Public
-Health, Seventh Report. 1865,” pp. 498-502, passim.
-100 In 1865 this law was improved to some extent. It will soon be learnt from experience that tinkering
-of this sort is of no use.
-101 In order to understand that which follows, we must remember that “Close Villages” are those
-whose owners are one or two large landlords. “Open villages,” those whose soil belongs to many
-smaller landlords. It is in the latter that building speculators can build cottages and lodging-houses.
-102 A show-village of this kind looks very nice, but is as unreal as the villages that Catherine II. saw on
-her journey to the Crimea. In recent times the shepherd also has often been banished from these show-
-499 Chapter 25
-villages; e.g., near Market Harboro is sheep-farm of about 500 acres, which only employs the labour
-of one man. To reduce the long trudges over these wide plains, the beautiful pastures of Leicester and
-Northampton, the shepherd used to get a cottage on the farm. Now they give him a thirteenth shilling a
-week for lodging, that he must find far away in an open village.
-103 “The labourers’ houses (in the open villages, which, of course, are always overcrowded) are
-usually in rows, built with their backs against the extreme edge of the plot of land which the builder
-could call his, and on this account are not allowed light and air, except from the front.” (Dr. Hunter’s
-Report, l. c., p. 135.) Very often the beerseller or grocer of the village is at the same time the letter of
-its houses. In this case the agricultural labourer finds in him a second master, besides the farmer. He
-must be his customer as well as his tenant. “The hind with his 10s. a week, minus a rent of £4 a year ...
-is obliged to buy at the seller’s own terms, his modicum of tea, sugar, flour, soap, candles, and beer.”
-(l. c., p. 132.) These open villages form, in fact, the “penal settlements” of the English agricultural
-proletariat. Many of the cottages are simply lodging-houses, through which all the rabble of the
-neighbourhood passes. The country labourer and his family who had often, in a way truly wonderful,
-preserved, under the foulest conditions, a thoroughness and purity of character, go, in these, utterly to
-the devil. It is, of course, the fashion amongst the aristocratic shylocks to shrug their shoulders
-pharisaically at the building speculators, the small landlords, and the open villages. They know well
-enough that their “close villages” and “show-villages” are the birth-places of the open villages, and
-could not exist without them. “The labourers ... were it not for the small owners, would, for by far the
-most part, have to sleep under the trees of the farms on which they work.” (l. c., p. 135.) The system
-of “open” and “closed” villages obtains in all the Midland counties and throughout the East of
-England.
-104 “The employer ... is ... directly or indirectly securing to himself the profit on a man employed at
-10s. a week, and receiving from this poor hind £4 or £5 annual rent for houses not worth £20 in a
-really free market, but maintained at their artificial value by the power of the owner to say ‘Use my
-house, or go seek a hiring elsewhere without a character from me....’ Does a man wish to better
-himself, to go as a plate-layer on the railway, or to begin quarry-work, the same power is ready with
-‘Work for me at this low rate of wages or begone at a week’s notice; take your pig with you, and get
-what you can for the potatoes growing in your garden.’ Should his interest appear to be better served
-by it, an enhanced rent is sometimes preferred in these cases by the owner (i.e., the farmer) as the
-penalty for leaving his service.” (Dr. Hunter, l. c., p. 132.)
-105 “New married couples are no edifying study for grown-up brothers and sisters: and though
-instances must not be recorded, sufficient data are remembered to warrant the remark, that great
-depression and sometimes death are the lot of the female participator in the offence of incest.” (Dr.
-Hunter, l. c., p. 137.) A member of the rural police who had for many years been a detective in the
-worst quarters of London, says of the girls of his village: “their boldness and shamelessness I never
-saw equalled during some years of police life and detective duty in the worst parts of London .... They
-live like pigs, great boys and girls, mothers and fathers, all sleeping in one room, in many instances.”
-(“Child. Empl. Com. Sixth Report, 1867,” p. 77 sq. 155.)
-106 “Public Health. Seventh Report, 1865,” pp. 9, 14 passim.
-107 “The heaven-born employment of the hind gives dignity even to his position. He is not a slave, but
-a soldier of peace, and deserves his place in married men’s quarters to be provided by the landlord,
-who has claimed a power of enforced labour similar to that the country demands of the soldier. He no
-more receives market-price for his work than does the soldier. Like the soldier he is caught young,
-ignorant, knowing only his own trade, and his own locality. Early marriage and the operation of the
-various laws of settlement affect the one as enlistment and the Mutiny Act affect the other.” (Dr.
-Hunter, l. c., p. 132.) Sometimes an exceptionally soft-hearted landlord relents as the solitude he has
-created. “It is a melancholy thing to stand alone in one’s country,” said Lord Leicester, when
-500 Chapter 25
-complimented on the completion of Hookham. “I look around and not a house is to be seen but mine. I
-am the giant of Giant Castle, and have eat up all my neighbours.”
-108 A similar movement is seen during the last ten years in France; in proportion as capitalist
-production there takes possession of agriculture, it drives the “surplus” agricultural population into the
-towns. Here also we find deterioration in the housing and other conditions at the source of the surplus
-population. On the special “prolétariat foncier,” to which this system of parcelling out the land has
-given rise, see, among others, the work of Colins, already quoted, and Karl Marx “Der Achtzehnte
-Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte.” 2nd edition. Hamburg, 1869, pp. 56, &c. In 1846, the town
-population in France was represented by 24.42, the agricultural by 75.58; in 1861, the town by 28.86,
-the agricultural by 71.14 per cent. During the last 5 years, the diminution of the agricultural
-percentage of the population has been yet more marked. As early as 1846, Pierre Dupont in his
-“Ouvriers” sang:
-Mal vêtus, logés dans des trous,
-Sous les combles, dans les décombres,
-Nous vivons avec les hiboux
-Et les larrons, amis des ombres.
-[Badly clothed, living in holes, under the eaves, in the ruins, with the owls and the thieves,
-companions of the shadows]
-109 “Sixth and last Report of the Children’s Employment Commission,” published at the end of March,
-1867. It deals solely with the agricultural gang-system.
-110 “Child. Emp. Comm., VI. Report." Evidence 173, p. 37.
-111 Some gang-masters, however, have worked themselves up to the position of farmers of 500 acres,
-or proprietors of whole rows of houses.
-112 “Half the girls of Ludford have been ruined by going out” (in gangs). l. c., p. 6, § 32.
-113 “They (gangs) have greatly increased of late years. In some places they are said to have been
-introduced at comparatively late dates; in others where gangs ... have been known for many years ...
-more and younger children are employed in them.” (l. c., p. 79, § 174).
-114 “Small farmers never employ gangs.” “It is not on poor land, but on land which affords rent of
-from 40 to 50 shillings, that women and children are employed in the greatest numbers.” (l. c., pp. 17,
-14.)
-115 To one of these gentlemen the taste of his rent was so grateful that he indignantly declared to the
-Commission of Inquiry that the whole hubbub was only due to the name of the system. If instead of
-“gang” it were called “the Agricultural Juvenile Industrial Self-supporting Association,” everything
-would be all right.
-116 “Gang work is cheaper than other work; that is why they are employed,” says a former gang-master
-(l. c., p. 17, § 14 )."The gang-system is decidedly the cheapest for the farmer, and decidedly the worst
-for the children,” says a farmer (l. c., p. 16, § 3.)
-117 “Undoubtedly much of the work now done by children in gangs used to be done by men and
-women. More men are out of work now where children and women are employed than formerly.” (l.
-c., p. 43, n. 202.) On the other hand, “the labour question in some agricultural districts, particularly the
-arable, is becoming so serious in consequence of emigration, and the facility afforded by railways for
-getting to large towns that I (the “I” is the steward of a great lord) think the services of children are
-most indispensable,” (l. c., p. 80, n. 180.) For the “labour question” in English agricultural districts,
-differently from the rest of the civilised world, means the landlords’ and farmers’ question, viz., how
-is it possible, despite an always increasing exodus of the agricultural folk, to keep up a sufficient
-501 Chapter 25
-relative surplus population in the country, and by means of it keep the wages of the agricultural
-labourer at a minimum?
-118 The “Public Health Report,” where in dealing with the subject of children’s mortality, the gang-
-system is treated in passing, remains unknown to the press, and, therefore, to the English public. On
-the other hand, the last report of the “Child. Empl. Comm.” afforded the press sensational copy always
-welcome. Whilst the Liberal press asked how the fine gentlemen and ladies, and the well-paid clergy
-of the State Church, with whom Lincolnshire swarms, could allow such a system to arise on their
-estates, under their very eyes, they who send out expressly missions to the Antipodes, “for the
-improvement of the morals of South Sea Islanders” — the more refined press confined itself to
-reflections on the coarse degradation of the agricultural population who are capable of selling their
-children into such slavery! Under the accursed conditions to which these “delicate” people condemn
-the agricultural labourer, it would not be surprising if he ate his own children. What is really
-wonderful is the healthy integrity of character, he has, in great part, retained. The official reports
-prove that the parents, even in the gang districts, loathe the gang-system. “There is much in the
-evidence that shows that the parents of the children would, in many instances, be glad to be aided by
-the requirements of a legal obligation, to resist the pressure and the temptations to which they are
-often subject. They are liable to be urged, at times by the parish officers, at times by employers, under
-threats of being themselves discharged, to be taken to work at an age when ... school attendance ...
-would be manifestly to their greater advantage.... All that time and strength wasted; all the suffering
-from extra and unprofitable fatigue produced to the labourer and to his children; every instance in
-which the parent may have traced the moral ruin of his child to the undermining of delicacy by the
-over-crowding of cottages, or to the contaminating influences of the public gang, must have been so
-many incentives to feelings in the minds of the labouring poor which can be well understood, and
-which it would be needless to particularise. They must be conscious that much bodily and mental pain
-has thus been inflicted upon them from causes for which they were in no way answerable; to which,
-had it been in their power, they would have in no way consented; and against which they were
-powerless to struggle.” (l. c., p. xx., § 82, and xxiii., n. 96.)
-119 Population of Ireland, 1801, 5,319,867 persons; 1811, 6,084,996; 1821, 6,869,544; 1831,
-7,828,347; 1841, 8,222,664.
-120 The result would be found yet more unfavourable if we went further back. Thus: Sheep in 1865,
-3,688,742, but in 1856, 3,694,294. Pigs in 1865, 1,299,893, but in 1858, 1,409,883
-121 The data of the text are put together from the materials of the “Agricultural Statistics, Ireland,
-General Abstracts, Dublin,” for the years 1860, et seq., and “Agricultural Statistics, Ireland. Tables
-showing the estimated average produce, &c., Dublin, 1866.” These statistics are official, and laid
-before Parliament annually.
-Note to 2nd edition. The official statistics for the year 1872 show, as compared with 1871, a decrease
-in area under cultivation of 134,915 acres. An increase occurred in the cultivation of green crops,
-turnips, mangold-wurzel, and the like; a decrease in the area under cultivation for wheat of 16,000
-acres; oats, 14,000; barley and rye, 4,000; potatoes, 66,632; flax, 34,667; grass, clover, vetches, rape-
-seed, 30,000. The soil under cultivation for wheat shows for the last 5 years the following stages of
-decrease: — 1868, 285,000 acres; 1869, 280,000; 1870, 259,000; 1871, 244,000; 1872, 228,000. For
-1872 we find, in round numbers, an increase of 2,600 horses, 80,000 horned cattle, 68,609 sheep, and
-a decrease of 236,000 pigs.
-122 The total yearly income under Schedule D. is different in this table from that which appears in the
-preceding ones, because of certain deductions allowed by law.
-502 Chapter 25
-123 If the product also diminishes relatively per acre, it must not be forgotten that for a century and a
-half England has indirectly exported the soil of Ireland, without as much as allowing its cultivators the
-means for making up the constituents of the soil that had been exhausted.
-124 As Ireland is regarded as the promised land of the “principle of population,” Th. Sadler, before the
-publication of his work on population, issued his famous book, “Ireland, its Evils and their Remedies.”
-2nd edition, London, 1829. Here, by comparison of the statistics of the individual provinces, and of
-the individual counties in each province, he proves that the misery there is not, as Malthus would have
-it, in proportion to the number of the population, but in inverse ratio to this.
-125 Between 1851 and 1874, the total number of emigrants amounted to 2,325,922.
-126 According to a table in Murphy’s “Ireland Industrial, Political and Social,” 1870, 94.6 per cent. of
-the holdings do not reach 100 acres, 5.4 exceed 100 acres.
-127 “Reports from the Poor Law Inspectors on the Wages of Agricultural Labourers in Dublin,” 1870.
-See also “Agricultural labourers (Ireland). Return, etc.” 8 March, 1861, London, 1862.
-128 l. c., pp. 29, 1.
-129 l. c., p. 12.
-130 l. c., p. 12.
-131 l. c., p. 25.
-132 l. c., p. 27.
-133 l. c., p. 25
-134 l. c., p. 1.
-135 l. c., pp. 31, 32.
-136 l. c., p. 25.
-137 l. c., p. 30.
-138 l. c., pp. 21, 13.
-139 “Rept. of Insp. of Fact., 31st Oct., 1866,” p. 96.
-140 The total area includes also peat, bogs, and waste land.
-141 How the famine and its consequences have been deliberately made the most of, both by the
-individual landlords and by the English legislature, to forcibly carry out the agricultural revolution and
-to thin the population of Ireland down to the proportion satisfactory to the landlords, I shall show
-more fully in Vol. III. of this work, in the section on landed property. There also I return to the
-condition of the small farmers and the agricultural labourers. At present, only one quotation. Nassau
-W. Senior says, with other things, in his posthumous work, “Journals, Conversations and Essays
-relating to Ireland.” 2 vols. London, 1868; Vol. II., p. 282. “Well,” said Dr. G., “we have got our Poor
-Law and it is a great instrument for giving the victory to the landlords. Another, and a still more
-powerful instrument is emigration.... No friend to Ireland can wish the war to be prolonged [between
-the landlords and the small Celtic farmers] — still less, that it should end by the victory of the tenants.
-The sooner it is over — the sooner Ireland becomes a grazing country, with the comparatively thin
-population which a grazing country requires, the better for all classes.” The English Corn Laws of
-1815 secured Ireland the monopoly of the free importation of corn into Great Britain. They favoured
-artificially, therefore, the cultivation of corn. With the abolition of the Corn Laws in 1846, this
-monopoly was suddenly removed. Apart from all other circumstances, this event alone was sufficient
-to give a great impulse to the turning of Irish arable into pasture land, to the concentration of farms,
-and to the eviction of small cultivators. After the fruitfulness of the Irish soil had been praised from
-1815 to 1846, and proclaimed loudly as by Nature herself destined for the cultivation of wheat,
-English agronomists, economists, politicians, discover suddenly that it is good for nothing but to
-503 Chapter 25
-produce forage. M. Léonce de Lavergne has hastened to repeat this on the other side of the Channel. It
-takes a “serious” man, à la Lavergne, to be caught by such childishness.
-Part 8: Primitive Accumulation
-505 Chapter 26
-Chapter 26: The Secret of Primitive
-Accumulation
-We have seen how money is changed into capital; how through capital surplus-value is made, and
-from surplus-value more capital. But the accumulation of capital presupposes surplus-value;
-surplus-value presupposes capitalistic production; capitalistic production presupposes the pre-
-existence of considerable masses of capital and of labour power in the hands of producers of
-commodities. The whole movement, therefore, seems to turn in a vicious circle, out of which we
-can only get by supposing a primitive accumulation (previous accumulation of Adam Smith)
-preceding capitalistic accumulation; an accumulation not the result of the capitalistic mode of
-production, but its starting point.
-This primitive accumulation plays in Political Economy about the same part as original sin in
-theology. Adam bit the apple, and thereupon sin fell on the human race. Its origin is supposed to
-be explained when it is told as an anecdote of the past. In times long gone by there were two sorts
-of people; one, the diligent, intelligent, and, above all, frugal elite; the other, lazy rascals,
-spending their substance, and more, in riotous living. The legend of theological original sin tells
-us certainly how man came to be condemned to eat his bread in the sweat of his brow; but the
-history of economic original sin reveals to us that there are people to whom this is by no means
-essential. Never mind! Thus it came to pass that the former sort accumulated wealth, and the
-latter sort had at last nothing to sell except their own skins. And from this original sin dates the
-poverty of the great majority that, despite all its labour, has up to now nothing to sell but itself,
-and the wealth of the few that increases constantly although they have long ceased to work. Such
-insipid childishness is every day preached to us in the defence of property. M. Thiers, e.g., had
-the assurance to repeat it with all the solemnity of a statesman to the French people, once so
-spirituel. But as soon as the question of property crops up, it becomes a sacred duty to proclaim
-the intellectual food of the infant as the one thing fit for all ages and for all stages of
-development. In actual history it is notorious that conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, briefly
-force, play the great part. In the tender annals of Political Economy, the idyllic reigns from time
-immemorial. Right and “labour” were from all time the sole means of enrichment, the present
-year of course always excepted. As a matter of fact, the methods of primitive accumulation are
-anything but idyllic.
-In themselves money and commodities are no more capital than are the means of production and
-of subsistence. They want transforming into capital. But this transformation itself can only take
-place under certain circumstances that centre in this, viz., that two very different kinds of
-commodity-possessors must come face to face and into contact; on the one hand, the owners of
-money, means of production, means of subsistence, who are eager to increase the sum of values
-they possess, by buying other people’s labour power; on the other hand, free labourers, the sellers
-of their own labour power, and therefore the sellers of labour. Free labourers, in the double sense
-that neither they themselves form part and parcel of the means of production, as in the case of
-slaves, bondsmen, &c., nor do the means of production belong to them, as in the case of peasant-
-proprietors; they are, therefore, free from, unencumbered by, any means of production of their
-own. With this polarisation of the market for commodities, the fundamental conditions of
-capitalist production are given. The capitalist system presupposes the complete separation of the
-labourers from all property in the means by which they can realize their labour. As soon as
-capitalist production is once on its own legs, it not only maintains this separation, but reproduces
-it on a continually extending scale. The process, therefore, that clears the way for the capitalist
-506 Chapter 26
-system, can be none other than the process which takes away from the labourer the possession of
-his means of production; a process that transforms, on the one hand, the social means of
-subsistence and of production into capital, on the other, the immediate producers into wage
-labourers. The so-called primitive accumulation, therefore, is nothing else than the historical
-process of divorcing the producer from the means of production. It appears as primitive, because
-it forms the prehistoric stage of capital and of the mode of production corresponding with it.
-The economic structure of capitalist society has grown out of the economic structure of feudal
-society. The dissolution of the latter set free the elements of the former.
-The immediate producer, the labourer, could only dispose of his own person after he had ceased
-to be attached to the soil and ceased to be the slave, serf, or bondsman of another. To become a
-free seller of labour power, who carries his commodity wherever he finds a market, he must
-further have escaped from the regime of the guilds, their rules for apprentices and journeymen,
-and the impediments of their labour regulations. Hence, the historical movement which changes
-the producers into wage-workers, appears, on the one hand, as their emancipation from serfdom
-and from the fetters of the guilds, and this side alone exists for our bourgeois historians. But, on
-the other hand, these new freedmen became sellers of themselves only after they had been robbed
-of all their own means of production, and of all the guarantees of existence afforded by the old
-feudal arrangements. And the history of this, their expropriation, is written in the annals of
-mankind in letters of blood and fire.
-The industrial capitalists, these new potentates, had on their part not only to displace the guild
-masters of handicrafts, but also the feudal lords, the possessors of the sources of wealth. In this
-respect, their conquest of social power appears as the fruit of a victorious struggle both against
-feudal lordship and its revolting prerogatives, and against the guilds and the fetters they laid on
-the free development of production and the free exploitation of man by man. The chevaliers
-d’industrie, however, only succeeded in supplanting the chevaliers of the sword by making use of
-events of which they themselves were wholly innocent. They have risen by means as vile as those
-by which the Roman freedman once on a time made himself the master of his patronus.
-The starting point of the development that gave rise to the wage labourer as well as to the
-capitalist, was the servitude of the labourer. The advance consisted in a change of form of this
-servitude, in the transformation of feudal exploitation into capitalist exploitation. To understand
-its march, we need not go back very far. Although we come across the first beginnings of
-capitalist production as early as the 14th or 15th century, sporadically, in certain towns of the
-Mediterranean, the capitalistic era dates from the 16th century. Wherever it appears, the abolition
-of serfdom has been long effected, and the highest development of the middle ages, the existence
-of sovereign towns, has been long on the wane.
-In the history of primitive accumulation, all revolutions are epoch-making that act as levers for
-the capital class in course of formation; but, above all, those moments when great masses of men
-are suddenly and forcibly torn from their means of subsistence, and hurled as free and
-“unattached” proletarians on the labour-market. The expropriation of the agricultural producer, of
-the peasant, from the soil, is the basis of the whole process. The history of this expropriation, in
-different countries, assumes different aspects, and runs through its various phases in different
-orders of succession, and at different periods. In England alone, which we take as our example,
-has it the classic form.
-1
-507 Chapter 26
-1In Italy, where capitalistic production developed earliest, the dissolution of serfdom also took place
-earlier than elsewhere. The serf was emancipated in that country before he had acquired any
-prescriptive right to the soil. His emancipation at once transformed him into a free proletarian, who,
-moreover, found his master ready waiting for him in the towns, for the most part handed down as
-legacies from the Roman time. When the revolution of the world-market, about the end of the 15th
-century, annihilated Northern Italy’s commercial supremacy, a movement in the reverse direction set
-in. The labourers of the towns were driven en masse into the country, and gave an impulse, never
-before seen, to the petite culture, carried on in the form of gardening.
-Chapter 27: Expropriation of the Agricultural
-Population From the Land
-In England, serfdom had practically disappeared in the last part of the 14th century. The immense
-majority of the population1 consisted then, and to a still larger extent, in the 15th century, of free
-peasant proprietors, whatever was the feudal title under which their right of property was hidden.
-In the larger seignorial domains, the old bailiff, himself a serf, was displaced by the free farmer.
-The wage labourers of agriculture consisted partly of peasants, who utilised their leisure time by
-working on the large estates, partly of an independent special class of wage labourers, relatively
-and absolutely few in numbers. The latter also were practically at the same time peasant farmers,
-since, besides their wages, they had allotted to them arable land to the extent of 4 or more acres,
-together with their cottages. Besides they, with the rest of the peasants, enjoyed the usufruct of
-the common land, which gave pasture to their cattle, furnished them with timber, fire-wood, turf,
-&c.2 In all countries of Europe, feudal production is characterised by division of the soil amongst
-the greatest possible number of subfeudatories. The might of the feudal lord, like that of the
-sovereign, depended not on the length of his rent roll, but on the number of his subjects, and the
-latter depended on the number of peasant proprietors.3 Although, therefore, the English land, after
-the Norman Conquest, was distributed in gigantic baronies, one of which often included some
-900 of the old Anglo-Saxon lordships, it was bestrewn with small peasant properties, only here
-and there interspersed with great seignorial domains. Such conditions, together with the
-prosperity of the towns so characteristic of the 15th century, allowed of that wealth of the people
-which Chancellor Fortescue so eloquently paints in his “Laudes legum Angliae;” but it excluded
-the possibility of capitalistic wealth.
-The prelude of the revolution that laid the foundation of the capitalist mode of production, was
-played in the last third of the 15th, and the first decade of the 16th century. A mass of free
-proletarians was hurled on the labour market by the breaking-up of the bands of feudal retainers,
-who, as Sir James Steuart well says, “everywhere uselessly filled house and castle.” Although the
-royal power, itself a product of bourgeois development, in its strife after absolute sovereignty
-forcibly hastened on the dissolution of these bands of retainers, it was by no means the sole cause
-of it. In insolent conflict with king and parliament, the great feudal lords created an incomparably
-larger proletariat by the forcible driving of the peasantry from the land, to which the latter had the
-same feudal right as the lord himself, and by the usurpation of the common lands. The rapid rise
-of the Flemish wool manufactures, and the corresponding rise in the price of wool in England,
-gave the direct impulse to these evictions. The old nobility had been devoured by the great feudal
-wars. The new nobility was the child of its time, for which money was the power of all powers.
-Transformation of arable land into sheep-walks was, therefore, its cry. Harrison, in his
-“Description of England, prefixed to Holinshed’s Chronicles,” describes how the expropriation of
-small peasants is ruining the country. “What care our great encroachers?” The dwellings of the
-peasants and the cottages of the labourers were razed to the ground or doomed to decay. “If,” says
-Harrison, “the old records of euerie manour be sought... it will soon appear that in some manour
-seventeene, eighteene, or twentie houses are shrunk... that England was neuer less furnished with
-people than at the present... Of cities and townes either utterly decaied or more than a quarter or
-half diminished, though some one be a little increased here or there; of townes pulled downe for
-sheepe-walks, and no more but the lordships now standing in them... I could saie somewhat.” The
-complaints of these old chroniclers are always exaggerated, but they reflect faithfully the
-509 Chapter 27
-impression made on contemporaries by the revolution in the conditions of production. A
-comparison of the writings of Chancellor Fortescue and Thomas More reveals the gulf between
-the 15th and 16th century. As Thornton rightly has it, the English working class was precipitated
-without any transition from its golden into its iron age.
-Legislation was terrified at this revolution. It did not yet stand on that height of civilisation where
-the “wealth of the nation” (i.e., the formation of capital, and the reckless exploitation and
-impoverishing of the mass of the people) figure as the ultima Thule of all state-craft. In his history
-of Henry VII., Bacon says: “Inclosures at that time (1489) began to be more frequent, whereby
-arable land (which could not be manured without people and families) was turned into pasture,
-which was easily rid by a few herdsmen; and tenancies for years, lives, and at will (whereupon
-much of the yeomanry lived) were turned into demesnes. This bred a decay of people, and (by
-consequence) a decay of towns, churches, tithes, and the like... In remedying of this
-inconvenience the king’s wisdom was admirable, and the parliament’s at that time... they took a
-course to take away depopulating enclosures, and depopulating pasturage.” An Act of Henry VII.,
-1489, cap. 19, forbad the destruction of all “houses of husbandry” to which at least 20 acres of
-land belonged. By an Act, 25 Henry VIII., the same law was renewed. It recites, among other
-things, that many farms and large flocks of cattle, especially of sheep, are concentrated in the
-hands of a few men, whereby the rent of land has much risen and tillage has fallen off, churches
-and houses have been pulled down, and marvellous numbers of people have been deprived of the
-means wherewith to maintain themselves and their families. The Act, therefore, ordains the
-rebuilding of the decayed farmsteads, and fixes a proportion between corn land and pasture land,
-&c. An Act of 1533 recites that some owners possess 24,000 sheep, and limits the number to be
-owned to 2,000.4 The cry of the people and the legislation directed, for 150 years after Henry
-VII., against the expropriation of the small farmers and peasants, were alike fruitless. The secret
-of their inefficiency Bacon, without knowing it, reveals to us. “The device of King Henry VII.,”
-says Bacon, in his “Essays, Civil and Moral,” Essay 29, “was profound and admirable, in making
-farms and houses of husbandry of a standard; that is, maintained with such a proportion of land
-unto them as may breed a subject to live in convenient plenty, and no servile condition, and to
-keep the plough in the hands of the owners and not mere hirelings.”5 What the capitalist system
-demanded was, on the other hand, a degraded and almost servile condition of the mass of the
-people, the transformation of them into mercenaries, and of their means of labour into capital.
-During this transformation period, legislation also strove to retain the 4 acres of land by the
-cottage of the agricultural wage labourer, and forbad him to take lodgers into his cottage. In the
-reign of James I., 1627, Roger Crocker of Front Mill, was condemned for having built a cottage
-on the manor of Front Mill without 4 acres of land attached to the same in perpetuity. As late as
-Charles I.’s reign, 1638, a royal commission was appointed to enforce the carrying out of the old
-laws, especially that referring to the 4 acres of land. Even in Cromwell’s time, the building of a
-house within 4 miles of London was forbidden unless it was endowed with 4 acres of land. As
-late as the first half of the 18th century complaint is made if the cottage of the agricultural
-labourer has not an adjunct of one or two acres of land. Nowadays he is lucky if it is furnished
-with a little garden, or if he may rent, far away from his cottage, a few roods. “Landlords and
-farmers,” says Dr. Hunter, “work here hand in hand. A few acres to the cottage would make the
-labourers too independent.”6
-The process of forcible expropriation of the people received in the 16th century a new and
-frightful impulse from the Reformation, and from the consequent colossal spoliation of the church
-property. The Catholic church was, at the time of the Reformation, feudal proprietor of a great
-part of the English land. The suppression of the monasteries, &c., hurled their inmates into the
-510 Chapter 27
-proletariat. The estates of the church were to a large extent given away to rapacious royal
-favourites, or sold at a nominal price to speculating farmers and citizens, who drove out, en
-masse, the hereditary sub-tenants and threw their holdings into one. The legally guaranteed
-property of the poorer folk in a part of the church’s tithes was tacitly confiscated.7 “Pauper ubique
-jacet,” cried Queen Elizabeth, after a journey through England. In the 43rd year of her reign the
-nation was obliged to recognise pauperism officially by the introduction of a poor-rate. “The
-authors of this law seem to have been ashamed to state the grounds of it, for [contrary to
-traditional usage] it has no preamble whatever.”8 By the 16th of Charles I., ch. 4, it was declared
-perpetual, and in fact only in 1834 did it take a new and harsher form.9 These immediate results
-of the Reformation were not its most lasting ones. The property of the church formed the
-religious bulwark of the traditional conditions of landed property. With its fall these were no
-longer tenable.10
-Even in the last decade of the 17th century, the yeomanry, the class of independent peasants, were
-more numerous than the class of farmers. They had formed the backbone of Cromwell’s strength,
-and, even according to the confession of Macaulay, stood in favourable contrast to the drunken
-squires and to their servants, the country clergy, who had to marry their masters’ cast-off
-mistresses. About 1750, the yeomanry had disappeared,11 and so had, in the last decade of the
-18th century, the last trace of the common land of the agricultural labourer. We leave on one side
-here the purely economic causes of the agricultural revolution. We deal only with the forcible
-means employed.
-After the restoration of the Stuarts, the landed proprietors carried, by legal means, an act of
-usurpation, effected everywhere on the Continent without any legal formality. They abolished the
-feudal tenure of land, i.e., they got rid of all its obligations to the State, “indemnified” the State
-by taxes on the peasantry and the rest of the mass of the people, vindicated for themselves the
-rights of modern private property in estates to which they had only a feudal title, and, finally,
-passed those laws of settlement, which, mutatis mutandis, had the same effect on the English
-agricultural labourer, as the edict of the Tartar Boris Godunof on the Russian peasantry.
-The “glorious Revolution” brought into power, along with William of Orange, the landlord and
-capitalist appropriators of surplus-value.12 They inaugurated the new era by practising on a
-colossal scale thefts of state lands, thefts that had been hitherto managed more modestly. These
-estates were given away, sold at a ridiculous figure, or even annexed to private estates by direct
-seizure.13 All this happened without the slightest observation of legal etiquette. The Crown lands
-thus fraudulently appropriated, together with the robbery of the Church estates, as far as these had
-not been lost again during the republican revolution, form the basis of the today princely domains
-of the English oligarchy.14 The bourgeois capitalists favoured the operation with the view, among
-others, to promoting free trade in land, to extending the domain of modern agriculture on the
-large farm-system, and to increasing their supply of the free agricultural proletarians ready to
-hand. Besides, the new landed aristocracy was the natural ally of the new bankocracy, of the
-newly-hatched haute finance, and of the large manufacturers, then depending on protective
-duties. The English bourgeoisie acted for its own interest quite as wisely as did the Swedish
-bourgeoisie who, reversing the process, hand in hand with their economic allies, the peasantry,
-helped the kings in the forcible resumption of the Crown lands from the oligarchy. This happened
-since 1604 under Charles X. and Charles XI.
-Communal property – always distinct from the State property just dealt with – was an old
-Teutonic institution which lived on under cover of feudalism. We have seen how the forcible
-usurpation of this, generally accompanied by the turning of arable into pasture land, begins at the
-end of the 15th and extends into the 16th century. But, at that time, the process was carried on by
-511 Chapter 27
-means of individual acts of violence against which legislation, for a hundred and fifty years,
-fought in vain. The advance made by the 18th century shows itself in this, that the law itself
-becomes now the instrument of the theft of the people’s land, although the large farmers make
-use of their little independent methods as well.15 The parliamentary form of the robbery is that of
-Acts for enclosures of Commons, in other words, decrees by which the landlords grant
-themselves the people’s land as private property, decrees of expropriation of the people. Sir F. M.
-Eden refutes his own crafty special pleading, in which he tries to represent communal property as
-the private property of the great landlords who have taken the place of the feudal lords, when he,
-himself, demands a “general Act of Parliament for the enclosure of Commons” (admitting thereby
-that a parliamentary coup d’état is necessary for its transformation into private property), and
-moreover calls on the legislature for the indemnification for the expropriated poor.16
-Whilst the place of the independent yeoman was taken by tenants at will, small farmers on yearly
-leases, a servile rabble dependent on the pleasure of the landlords, the systematic robbery of the
-Communal lands helped especially, next to the theft of the State domains, to swell those large
-farms, that were called in the 18th century capital farms17 or merchant farms,18 and to “set free”
-the agricultural population as proletarians for manufacturing industry.
-The 18th century, however, did not yet recognise as fully as the 19th, the identity between
-national wealth and the poverty of the people. Hence the most vigorous polemic, in the economic
-literature of that time, on the “enclosure of commons.” From the mass of materials that lie before
-me, I give a few extracts that will throw a strong light on the circumstances of the time. “In
-several parishes of Hertfordshire,” writes one indignant person, “24 farms, numbering on the
-average 50-150 acres, have been melted up into three farms.”19 “In Northamptonshire and
-Leicestershire the enclosure of common lands has taken place on a very large scale, and most of
-the new lordships, resulting from the enclosure, have been turned into pasturage, in consequence
-of which many lordships have not now 50 acres ploughed yearly, in which 1,500 were ploughed
-formerly. The ruins of former dwelling-houses, barns, stables, &c.,” are the sole traces of the
-former inhabitants. “An hundred houses and families have in some open-field villages dwindled
-to eight or ten.... The landholders in most parishes that have been enclosed only 15 or 20 years,
-are very few in comparison of the numbers who occupied them in their open-field state. It is no
-uncommon thing for 4 or 5 wealthy graziers to engross a large enclosed lordship which was
-before in the hands of 20 or 30 farmers, and as many smaller tenants and proprietors. All these are
-hereby thrown out of their livings with their families and many other families who were chiefly
-employed and supported by them.”20 It was not only the land that lay waste, but often land
-cultivated either in common or held under a definite rent paid to the community, that was
-annexed by the neighbouring landlords under pretext of enclosure. “I have here in view
-enclosures of open fields and lands already improved. It is acknowledged by even the writers in
-defence of enclosures that these diminished villages increase the monopolies of farms, raise the
-prices of provisions, and produce depopulation ... and even the enclosure of waste lands (as now
-carried on) bears hard on the poor, by depriving them of a part of their subsistence, and only goes
-towards increasing farms already too large.”21 “When,” says Dr. Price, “this land gets into the
-hands of a few great farmers, the consequence must be that the little farmers” (earlier designated
-by him “a multitude of little proprietors and tenants, who maintain themselves and families by the
-produce of the ground they occupy by sheep kept on a common, by poultry, hogs, &c., and who
-therefore have little occasion to purchase any of the means of subsistence”) “will be converted
-into a body of men who earn their subsistence by working for others, and who will be under a
-necessity of going to market for all they want.... There will, perhaps, be more labour, because
-there will be more compulsion to it.... Towns and manufactures will increase, because more will
-512 Chapter 27
-be driven to them in quest of places and employment. This is the way in which the engrossing of
-farms naturally operates. And this is the way in which, for many years, it has been actually
-operating in this kingdom.”22 He sums up the effect of the enclosures thus: “Upon the whole, the
-circumstances of the lower ranks of men are altered in almost every respect for the worse. From
-little occupiers of land, they are reduced to the state of day-labourers and hirelings; and, at the
-same time, their subsistence in that state has become more difficult.”23 In fact, usurpation of the
-common lands and the revolution in agriculture accompanying this, told so acutely on the
-agricultural labourers that, even according to Eden, between 1765 and 1780, their wages began to
-fall below the minimum, and to be supplemented by official poor-law relief. Their wages, he
-says, “were not more than enough for the absolute necessaries of life.”
-Let us hear for a moment a defender of enclosures and an opponent of Dr. Price. “Not is it a
-consequence that there must be depopulation, because men are not seen wasting their labour in
-the open field.... If, by converting the little farmers into a body of men who must work for others,
-more labour is produced, it is an advantage which the nation” (to which, of course, the
-“converted” ones do not belong) “should wish for ... the produce being greater when their joint
-labours are employed on one farm, there will be a surplus for manufactures, and by this means
-manufactures, one of the mines of the nation, will increase, in proportion to the quantity of corn
-produced.”24
-The stoical peace of mind with which the political economist regards the most shameless
-violation of the “sacred rights of property” and the grossest acts of violence to persons, as soon as
-they are necessary to lay the foundations of the capitalistic mode of production, is shown by Sir
-F. M. Eden, philanthropist and tory to boot. The whole series of thefts, outrages, and popular
-misery, that accompanied the forcible expropriation of the people, from the last third of the 15th
-to the end of the 18th century, lead him merely to the comfortable conclusion: “The due
-proportion between arable land and pasture had to be established. During the whole of the 14th
-and the greater part of the 15th century, there was one acre of pasture to 2, 3, and even 4 of arable
-land. About the middle of the 16th century the proportion was changed of 2 acres of pasture to 2,
-later on, of 2 acres of pasture to one of arable, until at last the just proportion of 3 acres of pasture
-to one of arable land was attained.”
-In the 19th century, the very memory of the connexion between the agricultural labourer and the
-communal property had, of course, vanished. To say nothing of more recent times, have the
-agricultural population received a farthing of compensation for the 3,511,770 acres of common
-land which between 1801 and 1831 were stolen from them and by parliamentary devices
-presented to the landlords by the landlords?
-The last process of wholesale expropriation of the agricultural population from the soil is, finally,
-the so-called clearing of estates, i.e., the sweeping men off them. All the English methods hitherto
-considered culminated in “clearing.” As we saw in the picture of modern conditions given in a
-former chapter, where there are no more independent peasants to get rid of, the “clearing” of
-cottages begins; so that the agricultural labourers do not find on the soil cultivated by them even
-the spot necessary for their own housing. But what “clearing of estates” really and properly
-signifies, we learn only in the promised land of modern romance, the Highlands of Scotland.
-There the process is distinguished by its systematic character, by the magnitude of the scale on
-which it is carried out at one blow (in Ireland landlords have gone to the length of sweeping away
-several villages at once; in Scotland areas as large as German principalities are dealt with), finally
-by the peculiar form of property, under which the embezzled lands were held.
-The Highland Celts were organised in clans, each of which was the owner of the land on which it
-was settled. The representative of the clan, its chief or “great man,” was only the titular owner of
-513 Chapter 27
-this property, just as the Queen of England is the titular owner of all the national soil. When the
-English government succeeded in suppressing the intestine wars of these “great men,” and their
-constant incursions into the Lowland plains, the chiefs of the clans by no means gave up their
-time-honoured trade as robbers; they only changed its form. On their own authority they
-transformed their nominal right into a right of private property, and as this brought them into
-collision with their clansmen, resolved to drive them out by open force. “A king of England might
-as well claim to drive his subjects into the sea,” says Professor Newman.25 This revolution, which
-began in Scotland after the last rising of the followers of the Pretender, can be followed through
-its first phases in the writings of Sir James Steuart26 and James Anderson.27 In the 18th century
-the hunted-out Gaels were forbidden to emigrate from the country, with a view to driving them by
-force to Glasgow and other manufacturing towns.28 As an example of the method29 obtaining in
-the 19th century, the “clearing” made by the Duchess of Sutherland will suffice here. This person,
-well instructed in economy, resolved, on entering upon her government, to effect a radical cure,
-and to turn the whole country, whose population had already been, by earlier processes of the like
-kind, reduced to 15,000, into a sheep-walk. From 1814 to 1820 these 15,000 inhabitants, about
-3,000 families, were systematically hunted and rooted out. All their villages were destroyed and
-burnt, all their fields turned into pasturage. British soldiers enforced this eviction, and came to
-blows with the inhabitants. One old woman was burnt to death in the flames of the hut, which she
-refused to leave. Thus this fine lady appropriated 794,000 acres of land that had from time
-immemorial belonged to the clan. She assigned to the expelled inhabitants about 6,000 acres on
-the sea-shore – 2 acres per family. The 6,000 acres had until this time lain waste, and brought in
-no income to their owners. The Duchess, in the nobility of her heart, actually went so far as to let
-these at an average rent of 2s. 6d. per acre to the clansmen, who for centuries had shed their blood
-for her family. The whole of the stolen clanland she divided into 29 great sheep farms, each
-inhabited by a single family, for the most part imported English farm-servants. In the year 1835
-the 15,000 Gaels were already replaced by 131,000 sheep. The remnant of the aborigines flung on
-the sea-shore tried to live by catching fish. They became amphibious and lived, as an English
-author says, half on land and half on water, and withal only half on both.30
-But the brave Gaels must expiate yet more bitterly their idolatry, romantic and of the mountains,
-for the “great men” of the clan. The smell of their fish rose to the noses of the great men. They
-scented some profit in it, and let the sea-shore to the great fishmongers of London. For the second
-time the Gaels were hunted out.31
-But, finally, part of the sheep-walks are turned into deer preserves. Every one knows that there
-are no real forests in England. The deer in the parks of the great are demurely domestic cattle, fat
-as London aldermen. Scotland is therefore the last refuge of the “noble passion.” “In the
-Highlands,” says Somers in 1848, “new forests are springing up like mushrooms. Here, on one
-side of Gaick, you have the new forest of Glenfeshie; and there on the other you have the new
-forest of Ardverikie. In the same line you have the Black Mount, an immense waste also recently
-erected. From east to west – from the neighbourhood of Aberdeen to the crags of Oban – you
-have now a continuous line of forests; while in other parts of the Highlands there are the new
-forests of Loch Archaig, Glengarry, Glenmoriston, &c. Sheep were introduced into glens which
-had been the seats of communities of small farmers; and the latter were driven to seek subsistence
-on coarser and more sterile tracks of soil. Now deer are supplanting sheep; and these are once
-more dispossessing the small tenants, who will necessarily be driven down upon still coarser land
-and to more grinding penury. Deer-forests32 and the people cannot co-exist. One or other of the
-two must yield. Let the forests be increased in number and extent during the next quarter of a
-century, as they have been in the last, and the Gaels will perish from their native soil... This
-514 Chapter 27
-movement among the Highland proprietors is with some a matter of ambition... with some love of
-sport... while others, of a more practical cast, follow the trade in deer with an eye solely to profit.
-For it is a fact, that a mountain range laid out in forest is, in many cases, more profitable to the
-proprietor than when let as a sheep-walk. ... The huntsman who wants a deer-forest limits his
-offers by no other calculation than the extent of his purse.... Sufferings have been inflicted in the
-Highlands scarcely less severe than those occasioned by the policy of the Norman kings. Deer
-have received extended ranges, while men have been hunted within a narrower and still narrower
-circle.... One after one the liberties of the people have been cloven down.... And the oppressions
-are daily on the increase.... The clearance and dispersion of the people is pursued by the
-proprietors as a settled principle, as an agricultural necessity, just as trees and brushwood are
-cleared from the wastes of America or Australia; and the operation goes on in a quiet, business-
-like way, &c.”33
-The spoliation of the church’s property, the fraudulent alienation of the State domains, the
-robbery of the common lands, the usurpation of feudal and clan property, and its transformation
-into modern private property under circumstances of reckless terrorism, were just so many idyllic
-methods of primitive accumulation. They conquered the field for capitalistic agriculture, made the
-soil part and parcel of capital, and created for the town industries the necessary supply of a “free”
-and outlawed proletariat.
-1 “The petty proprietors who cultivated their own fields with their own hands, and enjoyed a modest
-competence.... then formed a much more important part of the nation than at present. If we may trust
-the best statistical writers of that age, not less than 160,000 proprietors who, with their families, must
-have made up more than a seventh of the whole population, derived their subsistence from little
-freehold estates. The average income of these small landlords... was estimated at between £60 and £70
-a year. It was computed that the number of persons who tilled their own land was greater than the
-number of those who farmed the land of others.” Macaulay: “History of England,” 10th ed., 1854, I.
-pp. 333, 334. Even in the last third of the 17th century, 4/5 of the English people were agricultural. (l.
-c., p. 413.) I quote Macaulay, because as systematic falsifier of history he minimises as much as
-possible facts of this kind.
-2 We must never forget that even the serf was not only the owner, if but a tribute-paying owner, of the
-piece of land attached to his house, but also a co-possessor of the common land. “Le paysan (in
-Silesia, under Frederick II.) est serf.” Nevertheless, these serfs possess common lands. “On n’a pas pu
-encore engager les Silésiens au partage des communes, tandis que dans la Nouvelle Marche, il n’y a
-guère de village où ce partage ne soit exécuté avec le plus grand succès.” [The peasant ... is a serf. ... It
-has not yet been possible to persuade the Silesians to partition the common lands, whereas in the
-Neumark there is scarcely a village where the partition has not been implemented with very great
-success] (Mirabeau: “De la Monarchie Prussienne.” Londres, 1788, t. ii, pp. 125, 126.)
-3 Japan, with its purely feudal organisation of landed property and its developed petite culture, gives a
-much truer picture of the European middle ages than all our history books, dictated as these are, for
-the most part, by bourgeois prejudices. It is very convenient to be “liberal” at the expense of the
-middle ages.
-4 In his “Utopia,” Thomas More says, that in England “your shepe that were wont to be so meke and
-tame, and so smal eaters, now, as I heare saye, be become so great devourers and so wylde that they
-eate up, and swallow downe, the very men themselfes.” “Utopia,” transl. by Robinson, ed. Arber,
-Lond., 1869, p. 41.
-5 Bacon shows the connexion between a free, well-to-do peasantry and good infantry. “This did
-wonderfully concern the might and mannerhood of the kingdom to have farms as it were of a standard
-sufficient to maintain an able body out of penury, and did in effect amortise a great part of the lands of
-515 Chapter 27
-the kingdom unto the hold and occupation of the yeomanry or middle people, of a condition between
-gentlemen, and cottagers and peasants.... For it hath been held by the general opinion of men of best
-judgment in the wars.... that the principal strength of an army consisteth in the infantry or foot. And to
-make good infantry it requireth men bred, not in a servile or indigent fashion, but in some free and
-plentiful manner. Therefore, if a state run most to noblemen and gentlemen, and that the husbandman
-and ploughmen be but as their workfolk and labourers, or else mere cottagers (which are but hous’d
-beggars), you may have a good cavalry, but never good stable bands of foot.... And this is to be seen
-in France, and Italy, and some other parts abroad, where in effect all is noblesse or peasantry....
-insomuch that they are inforced to employ mercenary bands of Switzers and the like, for their
-battalions of foot; whereby also it comes to pass that those nations have much people and few
-soldiers.” (“The Reign of Henry VII.” Verbatim reprint from Kennet’s England. Ed. 1719. Lond.,
-1870, p. 308.)
-6 Dr. Hunter, l. c., p. 134. “The quantity of land assigned (in the old laws) would now be judged too
-great for labourers, and rather as likely to convert them into small farmers.” (George Roberts: “The
-Social History of the People of the Southern Counties of England in Past Centuries.” Lond., 1856, pp.
-184-185.)
-7 “The right of the poor to share in the tithe, is established by the tenour of ancient statutes.” (Tuckett,
-l. c., Vol. II., pg. 804-805.)
-8 William Cobbett: “A History of the Protestant Reformation,” § 471.
-9 The “spirit” of Protestantism may be seen from the following, among other things. In the south of
-England certain landed proprietors and well-to-do farmers put their heads together and propounded ten
-questions as to the right interpretation of the poor-law of Elizabeth. These they laid before a celebrated
-jurist of that time, Sergeant Snigge (later a judge under James I.) for his opinion. “Question 9 — Some
-of the more wealthy farmers in the parish have devised a skilful mode by which all the trouble of
-executing this Act (the 43rd of Elizabeth) might be avoided. They have proposed that we shall erect a
-prison in the parish, and then give notice to the neighbourhood, that if any persons are disposed to
-farm the poor of this parish, they do give in sealed proposals, on a certain day, of the lowest price at
-which they will take them off our hands; and that they will be authorised to refuse to any one unless
-he be shut up in the aforesaid prison. The proposers of this plan conceive that there will be found in
-the adjoining counties, persons, who, being unwilling to labour and not possessing substance or credit
-to take a farm or ship, so as to live without labour, may be induced to make a very advantageous offer
-to the parish. If any of the poor perish under the contractor’s care, the sin will lie at his door, as the
-parish will have done its duty by them. We are, however, apprehensive that the present Act (43rd of
-Elizabeth) will not warrant a prudential measure of this kind; but you are to learn that the rest of the
-freeholders of the county, and of the adjoining county of B, will very readily join in instructing their
-members to propose an Act to enable the parish to contract with a person to lock up and work the
-poor; and to declare that if any person shall refuse to be so locked up and worked, he shall be entitled
-to no relief. This, it is hoped, will prevent persons in distress from wanting relief, and be the means of
-keeping down parishes.” (R. Blakey: “The History of Political Literature from the Earliest Times.”
-Lond., 1855, Vol. II., pp. 84-85.) In Scotland, the abolition of serfdom took place some centuries later
-than in England. Even in 1698, Fletcher of Saltoun, declared in the Scotch parliament, “The number of
-beggars in Scotland is reckoned at not less than 200,000. The only remedy that I, a republican on
-principle, can suggest, is to restore the old state of serfdom, to make slaves of all those who are unable
-to provide for their own subsistence.” Eden, l. c., Book I., ch. 1, pp. 60-61, says, “The decrease of
-villenage seems necessarily to have been the era of the origin of the poor. Manufactures and
-commerce are the two parents of our national poor.” Eden, like our Scotch republican on principle,
-errs only in this: not the abolition of villenage, but the abolition of the property of the agricultural
-labourer in the soil made him a proletarian, and eventually a pauper. In France, where the
-516 Chapter 27
-expropriation was effected in another way, the ordonnance of Moulins, 1571, and the Edict of 1656,
-correspond to the English poor-laws.
-10 Professor Rogers, although formerly Professor of Political Economy in the University of Oxford,
-the hotbed of Protestant orthodoxy, in his preface to the “History of Agriculture” lays stress on the
-fact of the pauperisation of the mass of the people by the Reformation.
-11 “A Letter to Sir T. C. Bunbury, Bart., on the High Price of Provisions. By a Suffolk Gentleman.”
-Ipswich, 1795, p. 4. Even the fanatical advocate of the system of large farms, the author of the
-“Inquiry into the Connexion between the Present Price of Provisions,” London, 1773, p. 139, says: “I
-most lament the loss of our yeomanry, that set of men who really kept up the independence of this
-nation; and sorry I am to see their lands now in the hands of monopolising lords, tenanted out to small
-farmers, who hold their leases on such conditions as to be little better than vassals ready to attend a
-summons on every mischievous occasion.”
-12 On the private moral character of this bourgeois hero, among other things: “The large grant of lands
-in Ireland to Lady Orkney, in 1695, is a public instance of the king’s affection, and the lady’s
-influence... Lady Orkney’s endearing offices are supposed to have been — fœda labiorum ministeria.”
-(In the Sloane Manuscript Collection, at the British Museum, No. 4224. The Manuscript is entitled:
-“The character and behaviour of King William, Sunderland, etc., as represented in Original Letters to
-the Duke of Shrewsbury from Somers Halifax, Oxford, Secretary Vernon, etc.” It is full of curiosa.)
-13 “The illegal alienation of the Crown Estates, partly by sale and partly by gift, is a scandalous
-chapter in English history... a gigantic fraud on the nation.” (F. W. Newman, “Lectures on Political
-Economy.” London, 1851, pp. 129, 130.) [For details as to how the present large landed proprietors of
-England came into their possessions see “Our Old Nobility. By Noblesse Oblige.” London, 1879. —
-F. E.]
-14 Read, e.g., E. Burke’s Pamphlet on the ducal house of Bedford, whose offshoot was Lord John
-Russell, the “tomtit of Liberalism.”
-15 “The farmers forbid cottagers to keep any living creatures besides themselves and children, under
-the pretence that if they keep any beasts or poultry, they will steal from the farmers’ barns for their
-support; they also say, keep the cottagers poor and you will keep them industrious, &c., but the real
-fact I believe, is that the farmers may have the whole right of common to themselves.” (“A Political
-Inquiry into the Consequences of Enclosing Waste Lands.” London, 1785, p. 75.)
-16 Eden, l. c., preface.
-17 “Capital Farms.” Two letters on the Flour Trade and the Dearness of Corn. By a person in business.
-London, 1767, pp. 19, 20.
-18 “Merchant Farms.” “An Enquiry into the Causes of the Present High Price of Provisions.” London,
-1767, p. 11. Note.— This excellent work, that was published anonymously, is by the Rev. Nathaniel
-Forster.
-19 Thomas Wright: “A Short Address to the Public on the Monopoly of Large Farms,” 1779, pp. 2, 3.
-20 Rev. Addington: “Inquiry into the Reasons for or against Enclosing Open Fields,” London, 1772,
-pp. 37, 43 passim.
-21 Dr. R. Price, l. c., v. ii., p. 155, Forster, Addington, Kent, Price, and James Anderson, should be
-read and compared with the miserable prattle of Sycophant MacCulloch in his catalogue: “The
-Literature of Political Economy,” London, 1845.
-22 Price, l. c., p. 147.
-23 Price, l. c., p. 159. We are reminded of ancient Rome. “The rich had got possession of the greater
-part of the undivided land. They trusted in the conditions of the time, that these possessions would not
-be again taken from them, and bought, therefore, some of the pieces of land lying near theirs, and
-517 Chapter 27
-belonging to the poor, with the acquiescence of their owners, and took some by force, so that they now
-were cultivating widely extended domains, instead of isolated fields. Then they employed slaves in
-agriculture and cattle-breeding, because freemen would have been taken from labour for military
-service. The possession of slaves brought them great gain, inasmuch as these, on account of their
-immunity from military service, could freely multiply and have a multitude of children. Thus the
-powerful men drew all wealth to themselves, and all the land swarmed with slaves. The Italians, on
-the other hand, were always decreasing in number, destroyed as they were by poverty, taxes, and
-military service. Even when times of peace came, they were doomed to complete inactivity, because
-the rich were in possession of the soil, and used slaves instead of freemen in the tilling of it.” (Appian:
-“Civil Wars,” I.7.) This passage refers to the time before the Licinian rogations. Military service,
-which hastened to so great an extent the ruin of the Roman plebeians, was also the chief means by
-which, as in a forcing-house, Charlemagne brought about the transformation of free German peasants
-into serfs and bondsmen.
-24 “An Inquiry into the Connexion between the Present Price of Provisions, &c.,” pp. 124, 129. To the
-like effect, but with an opposite tendency: “Working-men are driven from their cottages and forced
-into the towns to seek for employment; but then a larger surplus is obtained, and thus capital is
-augmented.” (“The Perils of the Nation,” 2nd ed. London., 1843, p. 14.)
-25 l. c., p. 132.
-26 Steuart says: “If you compare the rent of these lands” (he erroneously includes in this economic
-category the tribute of the taskmen to the clanchief) “with the extent, it appears very small. If you
-compare it with the numbers fed upon the farm, you will find that an estate in the Highlands
-maintains, perhaps, ten times as many people as another of the same value in a good and fertile
-province.” (l. c., vol. i., ch. xvi., p. 104.)
-27 James Anderson: “Observations on the Means of Exciting a Spirit of National Industry, &c.,”
-Edinburgh, 1777.
-28 In 1860 the people expropriated by force were exported to Canada under false pretences. Some fled
-to the mountains and neighbouring islands. They were followed by the police, came to blows with
-them and escaped.
-29 “In the Highlands of Scotland,” says Buchanan, the commentator on Adam Smith, 1814, “the
-ancient state of property is daily subverted.... The landlord, without regard to the hereditary tenant (a
-category used in error here), now offers his land to the highest bidder, who, if he is an improver,
-instantly adopts a new system of cultivation. The land, formerly overspread with small tenants or
-labourers, was peopled in proportion to its produce, but under the new system of improved cultivation
-and increased rents, the largest possible produce is obtained at the least possible expense: and the
-useless hands being, with this view, removed, the population is reduced, not to what the land will
-maintain, but to what it will employ. “The dispossessed tenants either seek a subsistence in the
-neighbouring towns,” &c. (David Buchanan: “Observations on, &c., A. Smith’s Wealth of Nations.”
-Edinburgh, 1814, vol. iv., p. 144.) “The Scotch grandees dispossessed families as they would grub up
-coppice-wood, and they treated villages and their people as Indians harassed with wild beasts do, in
-their vengeance, a jungle with tigers.... Man is bartered for a fleece or a carcase of mutton, nay, held
-cheaper.... Why, how much worse is it than the intention of the Moguls, who, when they had broken
-into the northern provinces of China, proposed in council to exterminate the inhabitants, and convert
-the land into pasture. This proposal many Highland proprietors have effected in their own country
-against their own countrymen.” (George Ensor: “An Inquiry Concerning the Population of Nations.”
-Lond,. 1818, pp. 215, 216.)
-30 When the present Duchess of Sutherland entertained Mrs. Beecher Stowe, authoress of “Uncle
-Tom’s Cabin,” with great magnificence in London to show her sympathy for the Negro slaves of the
-518 Chapter 27
-American republic — a sympathy that she prudently forgot, with her fellow-aristocrats, during the
-civil war, in which every “noble” English heart beat for the slave-owner — I gave in the New York
-Tribune the facts about the Sutherland slaves. (Epitomised in part by Carey in “The Slave Trade.”
-Philadelphia, 1853, pp. 203, 204.) My article was reprinted in a Scotch newspaper, and led to a pretty
-polemic between the latter and the sycophants of the Sutherlands.
-31 Interesting details on this fish trade will be found in Mr. David Urquhart’s Portfolio, new series. —
-Nassau W. Senior, in his posthumous work, already quoted, terms “the proceedings in Sutherlandshire
-one of the most beneficent clearings since the memory of man.” (l. c.)
-32 The deer-forests of Scotland contain not a single tree. The sheep are driven from, and then the deer
-driven to, the naked hills, and then it is called a deer-forest. Not even timber-planting and real forest
-culture.
-33 Robert Somers: “Letters from the Highlands: or the Famine of 1847.” London, 1848, pp. 12-28
-passim. These letters originally appeared in The Times. The English economists of course explained
-the famine of the Gaels in 1847, by their over-population. At all events, they “were pressing on their
-food-supply.” The “clearing of estates,” or as it is called in Germany, “Bauernlegen,” occurred in
-Germany especially after the 30 years’ war, and led to peasant-revolts as late as 1790 in Kursachsen. It
-obtained especially in East Germany. In most of the Prussian provinces, Frederick II. for the first time
-secured right of property for the peasants. After the conquest of Silesia he forced the landlords to
-rebuild the huts, barns, etc., and to provide the peasants with cattle and implements. He wanted
-soldiers for his army and tax-payers for his treasury. For the rest, the pleasant life that the peasant led
-under Frederick’s system of finance and hodge-podge rule of despotism, bureaucracy and feudalism,
-may be seen from the following quotation from his admirer, Mirabeau: “Le lin fait donc une des
-grandes richesses du cultivateur dans le Nord de l’Allemagne. Malheureusement pour l’espèce
-humaine, ce n’est qu’une ressource contre la misère et non un moyen de bien-être. Les impôts directs,
-les corvées, les servitudes de tout genre, écrasent le cultivateur allemand, qui paie encore des impôts
-indirects dans tout ce qu’il achète.... et pour comble de ruine, il n’ose pas vendre ses productions où et
-comme il le veut; il n’ose pas acheter ce dont il a besoin aux marchands qui pourraient le lui livrer au
-meilleur prix. Toutes ces causes le ruinent insensiblement, et il se trouverait hors d’état de payer les
-impôts directs à l’échéance sans la filerie; elle lui offre une ressource, en occupant utilement sa
-femme, ses enfants, ses servants, ses valets, et lui-même; mais quelle pénible vie, même aidée de ce
-secours. En été, il travaille comme un forçat au labourage et à la récolte; il se couche à 9 heures et se
-lève à deux, pour suffire aux travaux; en hiver il devrait réparer ses forces par un plus grand repos;
-mais il manquera de grains pour le pain et les semailles, s’il se défait des denrées qu’il faudrait vendre
-pour payer les impôts. Il faut donc filer pour suppléer à ce vide.... il faut y apporter la plus grande
-assiduité. Aussi le paysan se couche-t-il en hiver à minuit, une heure, et se lève à cinq ou six; ou bien
-il se couche à neuf, et se lève à deux, et cela tous les jours de la vie si ce n’est le dimanche. Ces excès
-de veille et de travail usent la nature humaine, et de là vient qu’hommes et femmes vieillissent
-beaucoup plutôt dans les campagnes que dans les villes.” [Flax represents one of the greatest sources
-of wealth for the peasant of North Germany. Unfortunately for the human race, this is only a resource
-against misery and not a means towards well-being. Direct taxes, forced labour service, obligations of
-all kinds crush the German peasant, especially as he still has to pay indirect taxes on everything he
-buys, ... and to complete his ruin he dare not sell his produce where and as he wishes; he dare not buy
-what he needs from the merhcants who could sell it to him at a cheaper price. He is slowly ruined by
-all those factors, and when the dirct taxes fall due, he would find himself incapable of paying them
-without his spinning-wheel; it offers him a last resort, while providing useful occupation for his wife,
-his children, his maids, his farm-hands, and himself; but what a painful life he leads, even with this
-extra resource! In summer, he works like a convict with the plough and at harvest; he goes to bed at
-nine o’clock and rises at two to get through all his work; in winter he ought to be recovering his
-519 Chapter 27
-strength by sleeping longer; but he would run short of corn for his bread and next year’s sowing if he
-got rid of the products that he needs to sell in order to pay the taxes. He therefore has to spin to fill up
-this gap ... and indeed he must do so most assiduously. Thus the peasant goes to bed at midnight or
-one o’clock in winter, and gets up at five or six; or he goes to bed at nine and gets up at two, and this
-he does every day of his life except Sundays. These excessively short hours of sleep and long hours of
-work consume a person’s strength and hence it happens that men and women age much more in the
-country than in the towns] (Mirabeau, l. c., t.III. pp. 212 sqq.)
-Note to the second edition. In April 1866, 18 years after the publication of the work of Robert Somers
-quoted above, Professor Leone Levi gave a lecture before the Society of Arts on the transformation of
-sheep-walks into deer-forest, in which he depicts the advance in the devastation of the Scottish
-Highlands. He says, with other things: “Depopulation and transformation into sheep-walks were the
-most convenient means for getting an income without expenditure... A deer-forest in place of a sheep-
-walk was a common change in the Highlands. The landowners turned out the sheep as they once
-turned out the men from their estates, and welcomed the new tenants — the wild beasts and the
-feathered birds.... One can walk from the Earl of Dalhousie’s estates in Forfarshire to John O’Groats,
-without ever leaving forest land.... In many of these woods the fox, the wild cat, the marten, the
-polecat, the weasel and the Alpine hare are common; whilst the rabbit, the squirrel and the rat have
-lately made their way into the country. Immense tracts of land, much of which is described in the
-statistical account of Scotland as having a pasturage in richness and extent of very superior
-description, are thus shut out from all cultivation and improvement, and are solely devoted to the sport
-of a few persons for a very brief period of the year.” The London Economist of June 2, 1866, says,
-“Amongst the items of news in a Scotch paper of last week, we read... ’One of the finest sheep farms
-in Sutherlandshire, for which a rent of £1,200 a year was recently offered, on the expiry of the existing
-lease this year, is to be converted into a deer-forest.’ Here we see the modern instincts of feudalism ...
-operating pretty much as they did when the Norman Conqueror... destroyed 36 villages to create the
-New Forest.... Two millions of acres... totally laid waste, embracing within their area some of the most
-fertile lands of Scotland. The natural grass of Glen Tilt was among the most nutritive in the county of
-Perth. The deer-forest of Ben Aulder was by far the best grazing ground in the wide district of
-Badenoch; a part of the Black Mount forest was the best pasture for black-faced sheep in Scotland.
-Some idea of the ground laid waste for purely sporting purposes in Scotland may be formed from the
-fact that it embraced an area larger than the whole county of Perth. The resources of the forest of Ben
-Aulder might give some idea of the loss sustained from the forced desolations. The ground would
-pasture 15,000 sheep, and as it was not more than one-thirtieth part of the old forest ground in
-Scotland ... it might, &c., ... All that forest land is as totally unproductive.... It might thus as well have
-been submerged under the waters of the German Ocean.... Such extemporised wildernesses or deserts
-ought to be put down by the decided interference of the Legislature.”
-Chapter 28: Bloody Legislation Against the
-Expropriated, from the End of the 15th Century.
-Forcing Down of Wages by Acts of Parliament
-The proletariat created by the breaking up of the bands of feudal retainers and by the forcible
-expropriation of the people from the soil, this “free” proletariat could not possibly be absorbed by
-the nascent manufactures as fast as it was thrown upon the world. On the other hand, these men,
-suddenly dragged from their wonted mode of life, could not as suddenly adapt themselves to the
-discipline of their new condition. They were turned en masse into beggars, robbers, vagabonds,
-partly from inclination, in most cases from stress of circumstances. Hence at the end of the 15th
-and during the whole of the 16th century, throughout Western Europe a bloody legislation against
-vagabondage. The fathers of the present working class were chastised for their enforced
-transformation into vagabonds and paupers. Legislation treated them as “voluntary” criminals,
-and assumed that it depended on their own good will to go on working under the old conditions
-that no longer existed.
-In England this legislation began under Henry VII.
-Henry VIII. 1530: Beggars old and unable to work receive a beggar’s licence. On the other hand,
-whipping and imprisonment for sturdy vagabonds. They are to be tied to the cart-tail and whipped
-until the blood streams from their bodies, then to swear an oath to go back to their birthplace or to
-where they have lived the last three years and to “put themselves to labour.” What grim irony! In
-27 Henry VIII. the former statute is repeated, but strengthened with new clauses. For the second
-arrest for vagabondage the whipping is to be repeated and half the ear sliced off; but for the third
-relapse the offender is to be executed as a hardened criminal and enemy of the common weal.
-Edward VI.: A statute of the first year of his reign, 1547, ordains that if anyone refuses to work,
-he shall be condemned as a slave to the person who has denounced him as an idler. The master
-shall feed his slave on bread and water, weak broth and such refuse meat as he thinks fit. He has
-the right to force him to do any work, no matter how disgusting, with whip and chains. If the
-slave is absent a fortnight, he is condemned to slavery for life and is to be branded on forehead or
-back with the letter S; if he runs away thrice, he is to be executed as a felon. The master can sell
-him, bequeath him, let him out on hire as a slave, just as any other personal chattel or cattle. If the
-slaves attempt anything against the masters, they are also to be executed. Justices of the peace, on
-information, are to hunt the rascals down. If it happens that a vagabond has been idling about for
-three days, he is to be taken to his birthplace, branded with a red-hot iron with the letter V on the
-breast and be set to work, in chains, in the streets or at some other labour. If the vagabond gives a
-false birthplace, he is then to become the slave for life of this place, of its inhabitants, or its
-corporation, and to be branded with an S. All persons have the right to take away the children of
-the vagabonds and to keep them as apprentices, the young men until the 24th year, the girls until
-the 20th. If they run away, they are to become up to this age the slaves of their masters, who can
-put them in irons, whip them, &c., if they like. Every master may put an iron ring round the neck,
-arms or legs of his slave, by which to know him more easily and to be more certain of him. 1 The
-last part of this statute provides, that certain poor people may be employed by a place or by
-persons, who are willing to give them food and drink and to find them work. This kind of parish
-slaves was kept up in England until far into the 19th century under the name of “roundsmen.”
-521 Chapter 28
-Elizabeth, 1572: Unlicensed beggars above 14 years of age are to be severely flogged and
-branded on the left ear unless some one will take them into service for two years; in case of a
-repetition of the offence, if they are over 18, they are to be executed, unless some one will take
-them into service for two years; but for the third offence they are to be executed without mercy as
-felons. Similar statutes: 18 Elizabeth, c. 13, and another of 1597.2
-James 1: Any one wandering about and begging is declared a rogue and a vagabond. Justices of
-the peace in petty sessions are authorised to have them publicly whipped and for the first offence
-to imprison them for 6 months, for the second for 2 years. Whilst in prison they are to be whipped
-as much and as often as the justices of the peace think fit... Incorrigible and dangerous rogues are
-to be branded with an R on the left shoulder and set to hard labour, and if they are caught begging
-again, to be executed without mercy. These statutes, legally binding until the beginning of the
-18th century, were only repealed by 12 Anne, c. 23.
-Similar laws in France, where by the middle of the 17th century a kingdom of vagabonds
-(truands) was established in Paris. Even at the beginning of Louis XVI.’s reign (Ordinance of
-July 13th, 1777) every man in good health from 16 to 60 years of age, if without means of
-subsistence and not practising a trade, is to be sent to the galleys. Of the same nature are the
-statute of Charles V. for the Netherlands (October, 1537), the first edict of the States and Towns
-of Holland (March 10, 1614), the “Plakaat” of the United Provinces (June 26, 1649), &c.
-Thus were the agricultural people, first forcibly expropriated from the soil, driven from their
-homes, turned into vagabonds, and then whipped, branded, tortured by laws grotesquely terrible,
-into the discipline necessary for the wage system.
-It is not enough that the conditions of labour are concentrated in a mass, in the shape of capital, at
-the one pole of society, while at the other are grouped masses of men, who have nothing to sell
-but their labour-power. Neither is it enough that they are compelled to sell it voluntarily. The
-advance of capitalist production develops a working class, which by education, tradition, habit,
-looks upon the conditions of that mode of production as self-evident laws of Nature. The
-organisation of the capitalist process of production, once fully developed, breaks down all
-resistance. The constant generation of a relative surplus-population keeps the law of supply and
-demand of labour, and therefore keeps wages, in a rut that corresponds with the wants of capital.
-The dull compulsion of economic relations completes the subjection of the labourer to the
-capitalist. Direct force, outside economic conditions, is of course still used, but only
-exceptionally. In the ordinary run of things, the labourer can be left to the “natural laws of
-production,” i.e., to his dependence on capital, a dependence springing from, and guaranteed in
-perpetuity by, the conditions of production themselves. It is otherwise during the historic genesis
-of capitalist production. The bourgeoisie, at its rise, wants and uses the power of the state to
-“regulate” wages, i.e., to force them within the limits suitable for surplus-value making, to
-lengthen the working day and to keep the labourer himself in the normal degree of dependence.
-This is an essential element of the so-called primitive accumulation.
-The class of wage labourers, which arose in the latter half of the 14th century, formed then and in
-the following century only a very small part of the population, well protected in its position by the
-independent peasant proprietary in the country and the guild-organisation in the town. In country
-and town master and workmen stood close together socially. The subordination of labour to
-capital was only formal – i.e., the mode of production itself had as yet no specific capitalistic
-character. Variable capital preponderated greatly over constant. The demand for wage labour
-grew, therefore, rapidly with every accumulation of capital, whilst the supply of wage labour
-followed but slowly. A large part of the national product, changed later into a fund of capitalist
-accumulation, then still entered into the consumption-fund of the labourer.
-522 Chapter 28
-Legislation on wage labour (from the first, aimed at the exploitation of the labourer and, as it
-advanced, always equally hostile to him),3 is started in England by the Statute of Labourers, of
-Edward III., 1349. The ordinance of 1350 in France, issued in the name of King John,
-corresponds with it. English and French legislation run parallel and are identical in purport. So far
-as the labour-statutes aim at compulsory extension of the working day, I do not return to them, as
-this point was treated earlier (Chap. X., Section 5).
-The Statute of Labourers was passed at the urgent instance of the House of Commons. A Tory
-says naïvely:
-“Formerly the poor demanded such high wages as to threaten industry and wealth.
-Next, their wages are so low as to threaten industry and wealth equally and
-perhaps more, but in another way.”4 A tariff of wages was fixed by law for town
-and country, for piece-work and day-work. The agricultural labourers were to hire
-themselves out by the year, the town ones “in open market.” It was forbidden,
-under pain of imprisonment, to pay higher wages than those fixed by the statute,
-but the taking of higher wages was more severely punished than the giving them.
-[So also in Sections 18 and 19 of the Statute of Apprentices of Elizabeth, ten
-days’ imprisonment is decreed for him that pays the higher wages, but twenty-one
-days for him that receives them.] A statute of 1360 increased the penalties and
-authorised the masters to extort labour at the legal rate of wages by corporal
-punishment. All combinations, contracts, oaths, &c., by which masons and
-carpenters reciprocally bound themselves, were declared null and void. Coalition
-of the labourers is treated as a heinous crime from the 14th century to 1825, the
-year of the repeal of the laws against Trades’ Unions. The spirit of the Statute of
-Labourers of 1349 and of its offshoots comes out clearly in the fact, that indeed a
-maximum of wages is dictated by the State, but on no account a minimum.
-In the 16th century, the condition of the labourers had, as we know, become much worse. The
-money wage rose, but not in proportion to the depreciation of money and the corresponding rise
-in the prices of commodities. Wages, therefore, in reality fell. Nevertheless, the laws for keeping
-them down remained in force, together with the ear-clipping and branding of those “whom no one
-was willing to take into service.” By the Statute of Apprentices 5 Elizabeth, c. 3, the justices of
-the peace were empowered to fix certain wages and to modify them according to the time of the
-year and the price of commodities. James I. extended these regulations of labour also to weavers,
-spinners, and all possible categories of workers.5 George II. extended the laws against coalitions
-of labourers to manufactures. In the manufacturing period par excellence, the capitalist mode of
-production had become sufficiently strong to render legal regulation of wages as impracticable as
-it was unnecessary; but the ruling classes were unwilling in case of necessity to be without the
-weapons of the old arsenal. Still, 8 George II. forbade a higher day’s wage than 2s. 7½d. for
-journeymen tailors in and around London, except in cases of general mourning; still, 13 George
-III., c. 68, gave the regulation of the wages of silk-weavers to the justices of the peace; still, in
-1706, it required two judgments of the higher courts to decide, whether the mandates of justices
-of the peace as to wages held good also for non-agricultural labourers; still, in 1799, an act of
-Parliament ordered that the wages of the Scotch miners should continue to be regulated by a
-statute of Elizabeth and two Scotch acts of 1661 and 1671. How completely in the meantime
-circumstances had changed, is proved by an occurrence unheard-of before in the English Lower
-House. In that place, where for more than 400 years laws had been made for the maximum,
-beyond which wages absolutely must not rise, Whitbread in 1796 proposed a legal minimum
-wage for agricultural labourers. Pitt opposed this, but confessed that the “condition of the poor
-523 Chapter 28
-was cruel.” Finally, in 1813, the laws for the regulation of wages were repealed. They were an
-absurd anomaly, since the capitalist regulated his factory by his private legislation, and could by
-the poor-rates make up the wage of the agricultural labourer to the indispensable minimum. The
-provisions of the labour statutes as to contracts between master and workman, as to giving notice
-and the like, which only allow of a civil action against the contract-breaking master, but on the
-contrary permit a criminal action against the contract-breaking workman, are to this hour (1873)
-in full force. The barbarous laws against Trades’ Unions fell in 1825 before the threatening
-bearing of the proletariat. Despite this, they fell only in part. Certain beautiful fragments of the
-old statute vanished only in 1859. Finally, the act of Parliament of June 29, 1871, made a
-pretence of removing the last traces of this class of legislation by legal recognition of Trades’
-Unions. But an act of Parliament of the same date (an act to amend the criminal law relating to
-violence, threats, and molestation), re-established, in point of fact, the former state of things in a
-new shape. By this Parliamentary escamotage the means which the labourers could use in a strike
-or lock-out were withdrawn from the laws common to all citizens, and placed under exceptional
-penal legislation, the interpretation of which fell to the masters themselves in their capacity as
-justices of the peace. Two years earlier, the same House of Commons and the same Mr.
-Gladstone in the well-known straightforward fashion brought in a bill for the abolition of all
-exceptional penal legislation against the working class. But this was never allowed to go beyond
-the second reading, and the matter was thus protracted until at last the “great Liberal party,” by an
-alliance with the Tories, found courage to turn against the very proletariat that had carried it into
-power. Not content with this treachery, the “great Liberal party” allowed the English judges, ever
-complaisant in the service of the ruling classes, to dig up again the earlier laws against
-“conspiracy,” and to apply them to coalitions of labourers. We see that only against its will and
-under the pressure of the masses did the English Parliament give up the laws against Strikes and
-Trades’ Unions, after it had itself, for 500 years, held, with shameless egoism, the position of a
-permanent Trades’ Union of the capitalists against the labourers.
-During the very first storms of the revolution, the French bourgeoisie dared to take away from the
-workers the right of association but just acquired. By a decree of June 14, 1791, they declared all
-coalition of the workers as “an attempt against liberty and the declaration of the rights of man,”
-punishable by a fine of 500 livres, together with deprivation of the rights of an active citizen for
-one year.6 This law which, by means of State compulsion, confined the struggle between capital
-and labour within limits comfortable for capital, has outlived revolutions and changes of
-dynasties. Even the Reign of Terror left it untouched. It was but quite recently struck out of the
-Penal Code. Nothing is more characteristic than the pretext for this bourgeois coup d’état.
-“Granting,” says Chapelier, the reporter of the Select Committee on this law, “that wages ought to
-be a little higher than they are, ... that they ought to be high enough for him that receives them, to
-be free from that state of absolute dependence due to the want of the necessaries of life, and
-which is almost that of slavery,” yet the workers must not be allowed to come to any
-understanding about their own interests, nor to act in common and thereby lessen their “absolute
-dependence, which is almost that of slavery;” because, forsooth, in doing this they injure “the
-freedom of their cidevant masters, the present entrepreneurs,” and because a coalition against the
-despotism of the quondam masters of the corporations is – guess what! – is a restoration of the
-corporations abolished by the French constitution.7
-524 Chapter 28
-1 The author of the “Essay on Trade, etc.,” 1770, says, “In the reign of Edward VI. indeed the English
-seem to have set, in good earnest, about encouraging manufactures and employing the poor. This we
-learn from a remarkable statute which runs thus: ‘That all vagrants shall be branded, &c.’” l. c., p. 5.
-2 Thomas More says in his “Utopia": “Therfore that on covetous and unsatiable cormaraunte and very
-plage of his native contrey maye compasse aboute and inclose many thousand akers of grounde
-together within one pale or hedge, the husbandman be thrust owte of their owne, or els either by
-coneyne and fraude, or by violent oppression they be put besydes it, or by wrongs and iniuries thei be
-so weried that they be compelled to sell all: by one meanes, therfore, or by other, either by hooke or
-crooke they muste needes departe awaye, poore, selye, wretched soules, men, women, husbands,
-wiues, fatherlesse children, widowes, wofull mothers with their yonge babes, and their whole
-household smal in substance, and muche in numbre, as husbandrye requireth many handes. Awaye
-thei trudge, I say, owte of their knowen accustomed houses, fyndynge no place to reste in. All their
-housholde stuffe, which is very little woorthe, thoughe it might well abide the sale: yet beeynge
-sodainely thruste owte, they be constrayned to sell it for a thing of nought. And when they haue
-wandered abrode tyll that be spent, what cant they then els doe but steale, and then iustly pardy be
-hanged, or els go about beggyng. And yet then also they be caste in prison as vagaboundes, because
-they go aboute and worke not: whom no man wyl set a worke though thei neuer so willyngly profre
-themselues therto.” Of these poor fugitives of whom Thomas More says that they were forced to
-thieve, “7,200 great and petty thieves were put to death,” in the reign of Henry VIII. (Holinshed,
-“Description of England,” Vol. 1, p. 186.) In Elizabeth’s time, “rogues were trussed up apace, and that
-there was not one year commonly wherein three or four hundred were not devoured and eaten up by
-the gallowes.” (Strype’s “Annals of the Reformation and Establishment of Religion and other Various
-Occurrences in the Church of England during Queen Elizabeth’s Happy Reign.” Second ed., 1725,
-Vol. 2.) According to this same Strype, in Somersetshire, in one year, 40 persons were executed, 35
-robbers burnt in the hand, 37 whipped, and 183 discharged as “incorrigible vagabonds.” Nevertheless,
-he is of opinion that this large number of prisoners does not comprise even a fifth of the actual
-criminals, thanks to the negligence of the justices and the foolish compassion of the people; and the
-other counties of England were not better off in this respect than Somersetshire, while some were even
-worse.
-3 “Whenever the legislature attempts to regulate the differences between masters and their workmen,
-its counsellors are always the masters,” says A. Smith. “L’esprit des lois, c’est la propriété,” says
-Linguet.
-4 “Sophisms of Free Trade.” By a Barrister. Lond., 1850, p. 206. He adds maliciously: “We were
-ready enough to interfere for the employer, can nothing now be done for the employed?”
-5 From a clause of Statute 2 James I., c. 6, we see that certain clothmakers took upon themselves to
-dictate, in their capacity of justices of the peace, the official tariff of wages in their own shops. In
-Germany, especially after the Thirty Years’ War, statutes for keeping down wages were general. “The
-want of servants and labourers was very troublesome to the landed proprietors in the depopulated
-districts. All villagers were forbidden to let rooms to single men and women; all the latter were to be
-reported to the authorities and cast into prison if they were unwilling to become servants, even if they
-were employed at any other work, such as sowing seeds for the peasants at a daily wage, or even
-buying and selling corn. (Imperial privileges and sanctions for Silesia, I., 25.) For a whole century in
-the decrees of the small German potentates a bitter cry goes up again and again about the wicked and
-impertinent rabble that will not reconcile itself to its hard lot, will not be content with the legal wage;
-the individual landed proprietors are forbidden to pay more than the State had fixed by a tariff. And
-yet the conditions of service were at times better after war than 100 years later; the farm servants of
-Silesia had, in 1652, meat twice a week, whilst even in our century, districts are known where they
-525 Chapter 28
-have it only three times a year. Further, wages after the war were higher than in the following
-century.” (G. Freytag.)
-6 Article I. of this law runs: “L’anéantissement de toute espèce de corporations du même état et
-profession étant l’une des bases fondamentales de la constitution française, il est défendu de les
-rétablir de fait sous quelque prétexte et sous quelque forme que ce soit.” Article IV. declares, that if
-“des citoyens attachés aux mêmes professions, arts et métiers prenaient des délibérations, faisaient
-entre eux des conventions tendantes à refuser de concert ou à n’accorder qu’à un prix déterminé le
-secours de leur industrie ou de leurs travaux, les dites délibérations et conventions... seront déclarées
-inconstitutionnelles, attentatoires à la liberté et à la declaration des droits de l’homme, &c.;” felony,
-therefore, as in the old labour-statutes. [As the abolition of any form of association between citizens of
-the same estate and profession is one of the foundations of the French constitution, it is forbidden to
-re-establish them under any pretext or in any form, whatever they might be. ... citizens belonging to
-the same profession, craft or trade have joint discussions and make joint decisions with the intention
-of refusing together to perform their trade or insisting together on providing the services of their trade
-or their labours only at a particular price, then the said deliberations and agreements ... shall be
-declared unconstitutional, derogatory to liberty and the declaration of the rights of man, etc.]
-(“Révolutions de Paris,” Paris, 1791, t. III, p. 523.)
-7 Buchez et Roux: “Histoire Parlementaire,” t. x., p. 195.
-Chapter 29: Genesis of the Capitalist Farmer
-Now that we have considered the forcible creation of a class of outlawed proletarians, the bloody
-discipline that turned them into wage labourers, the disgraceful action of the State which
-employed the police to accelerate the accumulation of capital by increasing the degree of
-exploitation of labour, the question remains: whence came the capitalists originally? For the
-expropriation of the agricultural population creates, directly, none but the greatest landed
-proprietors. As far, however, as concerns the genesis of the farmer, we can, so to say, put our
-hand on it, because it is a slow process evolving through many centuries. The serfs, as well as the
-free small proprietors, held land under very different tenures, and were therefore emancipated
-under very different economic conditions. In England the first form of the farmer is the bailiff,
-himself a serf. His position is similar to that of the old Roman villicus, only in a more limited
-sphere of action. During the second half of the 14th century he is replaced by a farmer, whom the
-landlord provided with seed, cattle and implements. His condition is not very different from that
-of the peasant. Only he exploits more wage labour. Soon he becomes a metayer, a half-farmer. He
-advances one part of the agricultural stock, the landlord the other. The two divide the total
-product in proportions determined by contract. This form quickly disappears in England, to give
-the place to the farmer proper, who makes his own capital breed by employing wage labourers,
-and pays a part of the surplus-product, in money or in kind, to the landlord as rent. So long,
-during the 15th century, as the independent peasant and the farm-labourer working for himself as
-well as for wages, enriched themselves by their own labour, the circumstances of the farmer, and
-his field of production, were equally mediocre. The agricultural revolution which commenced in
-the last third of the 15th century, and continued during almost the whole of the 16th (excepting,
-however, its last decade), enriched him just as speedily as it impoverished the mass of the
-agricultural people.1
-The usurpation of the common lands allowed him to augment greatly his stock of cattle, almost
-without cost, whilst they yielded him a richer supply of manure for the tillage of the soil. To this
-was added in the 16th century a very important element. At that time the contracts for farms ran
-for a long time, often for 99 years. The progressive fall in the value of the precious metals, and
-therefore of money, brought the farmers golden fruit. Apart from all the other circumstances
-discussed above, it lowered wages. A portion of the latter was now added to the profits of the
-farm. The continuous rise in the price of corn, wool, meat, in a word of all agricultural produce,
-swelled the money capital of the farm without any action on his part, whilst the rent he paid
-(being calculated on the old value of money) diminished in reality.2 Thus they grew rich at the
-expense both of their labourers and their landlords. No wonder, therefore, that England, at the end
-of the 16th century, had a class of capitalist farmers, rich, considering the circumstances of the
-time.3
-1 Harrison in his “Description of England,” says “although peradventure foure pounds of old rent be
-improved to fortie, toward the end of his term, if he have not six or seven yeares rent lieng by him,
-fiftie or a hundred pounds, yet will the farmer thinke his gaines verie small.”
-2 On the influence of the depreciation of money in the 16th century, on the different classes of society,
-see “A Compendium of Briefe Examination of Certayne Ordinary Complaints of Divers of our
-Countrymen in these our Days,” by W. S. Gentleman (London 1581). The dialogue form of this work
-led people for a long time to ascribe it to Shakespeare, and even in 1751, it was published under his
-name. Its author is William Stafford. In one place the knight reasons as follows: Knight: You, my
-527 Chapter 29
-neighbor, the husbandman, you Maister Mercer, and you Goodman Cooper, with other artificers, may
-save yourselves metely well. For as much as all things are dearer than they were, so much do you arise
-in the pryce of your wares and occupations that ye sell agayne. But we have nothing to sell whereby
-we might advance ye price there of, to countervaile those things that we must buy agayne.” In another
-place, the knight asks the doctor: “I pray you, what be those sorts that ye meane. And first, of those
-that ye thinke should have no losse thereby? Doctor: I mean all those that live by buying and selling,
-for as they buy deare, they sell thereafter. Knight: What is the next sort that ye say would win by it?
-Doctor: Marry, all such as have takings of fearmes in their owne manurance [cultivation] at the old
-rent, for where they pay after the olde rate they sell after the newe — that is, they paye for theire lande
-good cheape, and sell all things growing thereof deare. Knight: What sorte is that which, ye sayde
-should have greater losse hereby, than these men had profit? Doctor: It is all noblemen, gentlemen,
-and all other that live either by a stinted rent or stypend, or do not manure [cultivate] the ground, or
-doe occupy no buying and selling.”
-3 In France, the régisseur, steward, collector of dues for the feudal lords during the earlier part of the
-middle ages, soon became an homme d'affaires, who by extortion, cheating, &c., swindled himself
-into a capitalist. These régisseurs themselves were sometimes noblemen. E.g., “C'est li compte que
-messire Jacques de Thoraine, chevalier chastelain sor Besançon rent és-seigneur tenant les comptes à
-Dijon pour monseigneur le duc et comte de Bourgoigne, des rentes appartenant à la dite chastellenie,
-depuis xxve jour de décembre MCCCLIX jusqu'au xxviiie jour de décembre MCCCLX.” [This is the
-account given by M. Jacques de Thoraisse, knight, and Lord of a manor near Besançon, to the lord
-who administers the accounts at Dijon for his highness the Duke and Count of Burgundy, of the rents
-appurtenant to the above-mentioned manor, from the 25th day of December 1359 to the 28th day of
-December 1360] (Alexis Monteil: “Traité de Matériaux Manuscrits etc.,” pp. 234, 235.) Already it is
-evident here how in all spheres of social life the lion's share falls to the middleman. In the economic
-domain, e.g., financiers, stock-exchange speculators, merchants, shopkeepers skim the cream; in civil
-matters, the lawyer fleeces his clients; in politics the representative is of more importance than the
-voters, the minister than the sovereign; in religion, God is pushed into the background by the
-“Mediator,” and the latter again is shoved back by the priests, the inevitable middlemen between the
-good shepherd and his sheep. In France, as in England, the great feudal territories were divided into
-innumerable small homesteads, but under conditions incomparably more favorable for the people.
-During the 14th century arose the farms or terriers. Their number grew constantly, far beyond
-100,000. They paid rents varying from 1/12 to 1/5 of the product in money or in kind. These farms
-were fiefs, sub-fiefs, &c., according the value and extent of the domains, many of them only
-containing a few acres. But these farmers had rights of jurisdiction in some degree over the dwellers
-on the soil; there were four grades. The oppression of the agricultural population under all these petty
-tyrants will be understood. Monteil says that there were once in France 160,000 judges, where today,
-4,000 tribunals, including justices of the peace, suffice.
-Chapter 30: Reaction of the Agricultural
-Revolution on Industry. Creation of the Home-
-Market for Industrial Capital
-The expropriation and expulsion of the agricultural population, intermittent but renewed again
-and again, supplied, as we saw, the town industries with a mass of proletarians entirely
-unconnected with the corporate guilds and unfettered by them; a fortunate circumstance that
-makes old A. Anderson (not to be confounded with James Anderson), in his “History of
-Commerce,” believe in the direct intervention of Providence. We must still pause a moment on
-this element of primitive accumulation. The thinning-out of the independent, self-supporting
-peasants not only brought about the crowding together of the industrial proletariat, in the way that
-Geoffrey Saint Hilaire explained the condensation of cosmical matter at one place, by its
-rarefaction at another.1 In spite of the smaller number of its cultivators, the soil brought forth as
-much or more produce, after as before, because the revolution in the conditions of landed
-property was accompanied by improved methods of culture, greater co-operation, concentration
-of the means of production, &c., and because not only were the agricultural wage labourers put
-on the strain more intensely2, but the field of production on which they worked for themselves
-became more and more contracted. With the setting free of a part of the agricultural population,
-therefore, their former means of nourishment were also set free. They were now transformed into
-material elements of variable capital. The peasant, expropriated and cast adrift, must buy their
-value in the form of wages, from his new master, the industrial capitalist. That which holds good
-of the means of subsistence holds with the raw materials of industry dependent upon home
-agriculture. They were transformed into an element of constant capital. Suppose, e.g., a part of
-the Westphalian peasants, who, at the time of Frederick II, all span flax, forcibly expropriated and
-hunted from the soil; and the other part that remained, turned into day labourers of large farmers.
-At the same time arise large establishments for flax-spinning and weaving, in which the men “set
-free” now work for wages. The flax looks exactly as before. Not a fibre of it is changed, but a
-new social soul has popped into its body. It forms now a part of the constant capital of the master
-manufacturer. Formerly divided among a number of small producers, who cultivated it
-themselves and with their families spun it in retail fashion, it is now concentrated in the hand of
-one capitalist, who sets others to spin and weave it for him. The extra labour expended in flax-
-spinning realised itself formerly in extra income to numerous peasant families, or maybe, in
-Frederick II’s time, in taxes pour le roi de Prusse. It realises itself now in profit for a few
-capitalists. The spindles and looms, formerly scattered over the face of the country, are now
-crowded together in a few great labour-barracks, together with the labourers and the raw material.
-And spindles, looms, raw material, are now transformed from means of independent existence for
-the spinners and weavers, into means for commanding them and sucking out of them unpaid
-labour.3 One does not perceive, when looking at the large manufactories and the large farms, that
-they have originated from the throwing into one of many small centres of production, and have
-been built up by the expropriation of many small independent producers. Nevertheless, the
-popular intuition was not at fault. In the time of Mirabeau, the lion of the Revolution, the great
-manufactories were still called manufactures réunies, workshops thrown into one, as we speak of
-fields thrown into one. Says Mirabeau:
-“We are only paying attention to the grand manufactories, in which hundreds of
-men work under a director and which are commonly called manufactures réunies.
-529 Chapter 30
-Those where a very large number of labourers work, each separately and on his
-own account, are hardly considered; they are placed at an infinite distance from
-the others. This is a great error, as the latter alone make a really important object
-of national prosperity.... The large workshop (manufacture réunie) will enrich
-prodigiously one or two entrepreneurs, but the labourers will only be journeymen,
-paid more or less, and will not have any share in the success of the undertaking. In
-the discrete workshop (manufacture separée), on the contrary, no one will become
-rich, but many labourers will be comfortable; the saving and the industrious will
-be able to amass a little capital, to put by a little for a birth of a child, for an
-illness, for themselves or their belongings. The number of saving and industrious
-labourers will increase, because they will see in good conduct, in activity, a means
-of essentially bettering their condition, and not of obtaining a small rise in wages
-that can never be of any importance of the future, and whose sole result is to place
-men in the position to live a little better, but only from day to day.... The large
-workshops, undertakings of certain private persons who pay labourers from day to
-day to work for their gain, may be able to put these private individuals at their
-ease, but they will never be an object worth the attention of governments. Discrete
-workshops, for the most part combined with cultivation of small holdings, are the
-only free ones.”4 The expropriation and eviction of a part of the agricultural
-population not only set free for industrial capital, the labourers, their means of
-subsistence, and material for labour; it also created the home-market.
-In fact, the events that transformed the small peasants into wage labourers, and their means of
-subsistence and of labour into material elements of capital, created, at the same time, a home-
-market for the latter. Formerly, the peasant family produced the means of subsistence and the raw
-materials, which they themselves, for the most part, consumed. These raw materials and means of
-subsistence have now become commodities; the large farmer sells them, he finds his market in
-manufactures. Yarn, linen, coarse woollen stuffs – things whose raw materials had been within
-the reach of every peasant family, had been spun and woven by it for its own use – were now
-transformed into articles of manufacture, to which the country districts at once served for
-markets. The many scattered customers, whom stray artisans until now had found in the
-numerous small producers working on their own account, concentrate themselves now into one
-great market provided for by industrial capital.5 Thus, hand in hand with the expropriation of the
-self-supporting peasants, with their separation from their means of production, goes the
-destruction of rural domestic industry, the process of separation between manufacture and
-agriculture. And only the destruction of rural domestic industry can give the internal market of a
-country that extension and consistence which the capitalist mode of production requires. Still the
-manufacturing period, properly so called, does not succeed in carrying out this transformation
-radically and completely. It will be remembered that manufacture, properly so called, conquers
-but partially the domain of national production, and always rests on the handicrafts of the town
-and the domestic industry of the rural districts as its ultimate basis. If it destroys these in one
-form, in particular branches, at certain points, it calls them up again elsewhere, because it needs
-them for the preparation of raw material up to a certain point. It produces, therefore, a new class
-of small villagers who, while following the cultivation of the soil as an accessory calling, find
-their chief occupation in industrial labour, the products of which they sell to the manufacturers
-directly, or through the medium of merchants. This is one, though not the chief, cause of a
-phenomenon which, at first, puzzles the student of English history.6 From the last third of the
-15th century he finds continually complaints, only interrupted at certain intervals, about the
-encroachment of capitalist farming in the country districts, and the progressive destruction of the
-530 Chapter 30
-peasantry. On the other hand, he always finds this peasantry turning up again, although in
-diminished number, and always under worse conditions. The chief reason is: England is at one
-time chiefly a cultivator of corn, at another chiefly a breeder of cattle, in alternate periods, and
-with these the extent of peasant cultivation fluctuates. Modern Industry alone, and finally,
-supplies, in machinery, the lasting basis of capitalistic agriculture, expropriates radically the
-enormous majority of the agricultural population, and completes the separation between
-agriculture and rural domestic industry, whose roots – spinning and weaving – it tears up.7 It
-therefore also, for the first time, conquers for industrial capital the entire home market.8
-1 In his “Notions de Philosophie Naturelle.” Paris, 1838.
-2 A point that Sir James Steuart emphasises.
-3 “Je permettrai,” says the capitalist, “que vous ayez l’honneur de me servir, à condition que vous me
-donnez le peu qui vous reste pour la peine que je prends de vous commander.” [I will allow you ... to
-have the honour of serving me, on condition that, in return for the pains I take in commanding you,
-you give me the little that remains to you] (J. J. Rousseau: “Discours sur l’Economie Politique.”)
-4 Mirabeau, l.c., t.III, pp.20-109 passim. That Mirabeau considers the separate workshops more
-economical and productive than the “combined,” and sees in the latter merely artificial exotics under
-government cultivation, is explained by the position at that time of a great part of the continental
-manufactures.
-5 “Twenty pounds of wool converted unobtrusively into yearly clothing of a labourer’s family by its
-own industry in the intervals of other works — this makes no show; but bring it to market, send it to
-the factory, thence to the broker, thence to the dealer, and you will have great commercial operations,
-and nominal capital engaged to the amount of twenty times its value.... The working-class is thus
-emersed to support a wretched factory population, a parastical shop-keeping class, and a fictitious
-commercial, monetary, and financial system.” (David Urquhart, l.c., p.120.)
-6 Cromwell’s time forms an exception. So long as the Republic lasted, the mass of the English people
-of all grades rose from the degradation into which they had sunk under the Tudors.
-7 Tuckett is aware that the modern woollen industry has sprung, with the introduction of machinery,
-from manufacture proper and from the destruction of rural and domestic industries.
-“The plough, the yoke, were ‘the invention of gods, and the occupation of heroes’; are the loom, the
-spindle, the distaff, of less noble parentage. You sever the distaff and the plough, the spindle and the
-yoke, and you get factories and poor-houses, credit and panics, two hostile nations, agriculture and
-commercial.” (David Urquhart, l.c., p.122.)
-But now comes Carey, and cries out upon England, surely not with unreason, that it is trying to turn
-every other country into a mere agricultural nation, whose manufacturer is to be England. He pretends
-that in this way Turkey has been ruined, because “the owners and occupants of land have never been
-permitted by England to strengthen themselves by the formation of that natural alliance between the
-plough and the loom, the hammer and the harrow.” (“The Slave Trade,” p.125.) According to him,
-Urquhart himself is one of the chief agents in the ruin of Turkey, where he had made Free-trade
-propaganda in the English interest. The best of it is that Carey, a great Russophile by the way, wants
-to prevent the process of separation by that very system of protection which accelerates it.
-8 Philanthropic English economists, like Mill, Rogers, Goldwin Smith, Fawcett, &c., and liberal
-manufacturers like John Bright & Co., ask the English landed proprietors, as God asked Cain after
-Abel, Where are our thousands of freeholders gone? But where do you come from, then? From the
-destruction of those freeholders. Why don’t you ask further, where are the independent weavers,
-spinners, and artisans gone?
-Chapter 31: The Genesis of the Industrial
-Capitalist
-The genesis of the industrial* capitalist did not proceed in such a gradual way as that of the
-farmer. Doubtless many small guild-masters, and yet more independent small artisans, or even
-wage labourers, transformed themselves into small capitalists, and (by gradually extending
-exploitation of wage labour and corresponding accumulation) into full-blown capitalists. In the
-infancy of capitalist production, things often happened as in the infancy of medieval towns, where
-the question, which of the escaped serfs should be master and which servant, was in great part
-decided by the earlier or later date of their flight. The snail’s pace of this method corresponded in
-no wise with the commercial requirements of the new world market that the great discoveries of
-the end of the 15th century created. But the middle ages had handed down two distinct forms of
-capital, which mature in the most different economic social formations, and which before the era
-of the capitalist mode of production, are considered as capital quand même [all the same] –
-usurer’s capital and merchant’s capital.
-“At present, all the wealth of society goes first into the possession of the capitalist
-... he pays the landowner his rent, the labourer his wages, the tax and tithe
-gatherer their claims, and keeps a large, indeed the largest, and a continually
-augmenting share, of the annual produce of labour for himself. The capitalist may
-now be said to be the first owner of all the wealth of the community, though no
-law has conferred on him the right to this property... this change has been effected
-by the taking of interest on capital ... and it is not a little curious that all the law-
-givers of Europe endeavoured to prevent this by statutes, viz., statutes against
-usury.... The power of the capitalist over all the wealth of the country is a
-complete change in the right of property, and by what law, or series of laws, was it
-effected?”2
-The author should have remembered that revolutions are not made by laws.
-The money capital formed by means of usury and commerce was prevented from turning into
-industrial capital, in the country by the feudal constitution, in the towns by the guild
-organisation.3 These fetters vanished with the dissolution of feudal society, with the expropriation
-and partial eviction of the country population. The new manufactures were established at sea-
-ports, or at inland points beyond the control of the old municipalities and their guilds. Hence in
-England an embittered struggle of the corporate towns against these new industrial nurseries.
-The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in
-mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies,
-the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy
-dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of
-primitive accumulation. On their heels treads the commercial war of the European nations, with
-the globe for a theatre. It begins with the revolt of the Netherlands from Spain, assumes giant
-dimensions in England’s Anti-Jacobin War, and is still going on in the opium wars against China,
-&c.
-The different momenta of primitive accumulation distribute themselves now, more or less in
-chronological order, particularly over Spain, Portugal, Holland, France, and England. In England
-at the end of the 17th century, they arrive at a systematical combination, embracing the colonies,
-the national debt, the modern mode of taxation, and the protectionist system. These methods
-depend in part on brute force, e.g., the colonial system. But, they all employ the power of the
-532 Chapter 31
-State, the concentrated and organised force of society, to hasten, hot-house fashion, the process of
-transformation of the feudal mode of production into the capitalist mode, and to shorten the
-transition. Force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one. It is itself an
-economic power.
-Of the Christian colonial system, W. Howitt, a man who makes a speciality of Christianity, says:
-“The barbarities and desperate outrages of the so-called Christian race, throughout
-every region of the world, and upon every people they have been able to subdue,
-are not to be paralleled by those of any other race, however fierce, however
-untaught, and however reckless of mercy and of shame, in any age of the earth.” 4
-The history of the colonial administration of Holland – and Holland was the head capitalistic
-nation of the 17th century –
-“is one of the most extraordinary relations of treachery, bribery, massacre, and
-meanness”5
-Nothing is more characteristic than their system of stealing men, to get slaves for Java. The men
-stealers were trained for this purpose. The thief, the interpreter, and the seller, were the chief
-agents in this trade, native princes the chief sellers. The young people stolen, were thrown into
-the secret dungeons of Celebes, until they were ready for sending to the slave-ships. An official
-report says:
-“This one town of Macassar, e.g., is full of secret prisons, one more horrible than
-the other, crammed with unfortunates, victims of greed and tyranny fettered in
-chains, forcibly torn from their families.”
-To secure Malacca, the Dutch corrupted the Portuguese governor. He let them into the town in
-1641. They hurried at once to his house and assassinated him, to “abstain” from the payment of
-£21,875, the price of his treason. Wherever they set foot, devastation and depopulation followed.
-Banjuwangi, a province of Java, in 1750 numbered over 80,000 inhabitants, in 1811 only 18,000.
-Sweet commerce!
-The English East India Company, as is well known, obtained, besides the political rule in India,
-the exclusive monopoly of the tea-trade, as well as of the Chinese trade in general, and of the
-transport of goods to and from Europe. But the coasting trade of India and between the islands, as
-well as the internal trade of India, were the monopoly of the higher employés of the company.
-The monopolies of salt, opium, betel and other commodities, were inexhaustible mines of wealth.
-The employés themselves fixed the price and plundered at will the unhappy Hindus. The
-Governor-General took part in this private traffic. His favourites received contracts under
-conditions whereby they, cleverer than the alchemists, made gold out of nothing. Great fortunes
-sprang up like mushrooms in a day; primitive accumulation went on without the advance of a
-shilling. The trial of Warren Hastings swarms with such cases. Here is an instance. A contract for
-opium was given to a certain Sullivan at the moment of his departure on an official mission to a
-part of India far removed from the opium district. Sullivan sold his contract to one Binn for
-£40,000; Binn sold it the same day for £60,000, and the ultimate purchaser who carried out the
-contract declared that after all he realised an enormous gain. According to one of the lists laid
-before Parliament, the Company and its employés from 1757-1766 got £6,000,000 from the
-Indians as gifts. Between 1769 and 1770, the English manufactured a famine by buying up all the
-rice and refusing to sell it again, except at fabulous prices.6
-The treatment of the aborigines was, naturally, most frightful in plantation-colonies destined for
-export trade only, such as the West Indies, and in rich and well-populated countries, such as
-Mexico and India, that were given over to plunder. But even in the colonies properly so called,
-the Christian character of primitive accumulation did not belie itself. Those sober virtuosi of
-533 Chapter 31
-Protestantism, the Puritans of New England, in 1703, by decrees of their assembly set a premium
-of £40 on every Indian scalp and every captured red-skin: in 1720 a premium of £100 on every
-scalp; in 1744, after Massachusetts-Bay had proclaimed a certain tribe as rebels, the following
-prices: for a male scalp of 12 years and upwards £100 (new currency), for a male prisoner £105,
-for women and children prisoners £50, for scalps of women and children £50. Some decades
-later, the colonial system took its revenge on the descendants of the pious pilgrim fathers, who
-had grown seditious in the meantime. At English instigation and for English pay they were
-tomahawked by red-skins. The British Parliament proclaimed bloodhounds and scalping as
-“means that God and Nature had given into its hand.”
-The colonial system ripened, like a hot-house, trade and navigation. The “societies Monopolia” of
-Luther were powerful levers for concentration of capital. The colonies secured a market for the
-budding manufactures, and, through the monopoly of the market, an increased accumulation. The
-treasures captured outside Europe by undisguised looting, enslavement, and murder, floated back
-to the mother-country and were there turned into capital. Holland, which first fully developed the
-colonial system, in 1648 stood already in the acme of its commercial greatness. It was
-“in almost exclusive possession of the East Indian trade and the commerce
-between the south-east and north-west of Europe. Its fisheries, marine,
-manufactures, surpassed those of any other country. The total capital of the
-Republic was probably more important than that of all the rest of Europe put
-together.” Gülich forgets to add that by 1648, the people of Holland were more
-over-worked, poorer and more brutally oppressed than those of all the rest of
-Europe put together.
-Today industrial supremacy implies commercial supremacy. In the period of manufacture
-properly so called, it is, on the other hand, the commercial supremacy that gives industrial
-predominance. Hence the preponderant rôle that the colonial system plays at that time. It was “the
-strange God” who perched himself on the altar cheek by jowl with the old Gods of Europe, and
-one fine day with a shove and a kick chucked them all of a heap. It proclaimed surplus-value
-making as the sole end and aim of humanity.
-The system of public credit, i.e., of national debts, whose origin we discover in Genoa and Venice
-as early as the Middle Ages, took possession of Europe generally during the manufacturing
-period. The colonial system with its maritime trade and commercial wars served as a forcing-
-house for it. Thus it first took root in Holland. National debts, i.e., the alienation of the state –
-whether despotic, constitutional or republican – marked with its stamp the capitalistic era. The
-only part of the so-called national wealth that actually enters into the collective possessions of
-modern peoples is their national debt.7 Hence, as a necessary consequence, the modern doctrine
-that a nation becomes the richer the more deeply it is in debt. Public credit becomes the credo of
-capital. And with the rise of national debt-making, want of faith in the national debt takes the
-place of the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost, which may not be forgiven.
-The public debt becomes one of the most powerful levers of primitive accumulation. As with the
-stroke of an enchanter’s wand, it endows barren money with the power of breeding and thus turns
-it into capital, without the necessity of its exposing itself to the troubles and risks inseparable
-from its employment in industry or even in usury. The state creditors actually give nothing away,
-for the sum lent is transformed into public bonds, easily negotiable, which go on functioning in
-their hands just as so much hard cash would. But further, apart from the class of lazy annuitants
-thus created, and from the improvised wealth of the financiers, middlemen between the
-government and the nation – as also apart from the tax-farmers, merchants, private manufacturers,
-to whom a good part of every national loan renders the service of a capital fallen from heaven –
-534 Chapter 31
-the national debt has given rise to joint-stock companies, to dealings in negotiable effects of all
-kinds, and to agiotage, in a word to stock-exchange gambling and the modern bankocracy.
-At their birth the great banks, decorated with national titles, were only associations of private
-speculators, who placed themselves by the side of governments, and, thanks to the privileges they
-received, were in a position to advance money to the State. Hence the accumulation of the
-national debt has no more infallible measure than the successive rise in the stock of these banks,
-whose full development dates from the founding of the Bank of England in 1694. The Bank of
-England began with lending its money to the Government at 8%; at the same time it was
-empowered by Parliament to coin money out of the same capital, by lending it again to the public
-in the form of banknotes. It was allowed to use these notes for discounting bills, making advances
-on commodities, and for buying the precious metals. It was not long ere this credit-money, made
-by the bank itself, became the coin in which the Bank of England made its loans to the State, and
-paid, on account of the State, the interest on the public debt. It was not enough that the bank gave
-with one hand and took back more with the other; it remained, even whilst receiving, the eternal
-creditor of the nation down to the last shilling advanced. Gradually it became inevitably the
-receptacle of the metallic hoard of the country, and the centre of gravity of all commercial credit.
-What effect was produced on their contemporaries by the sudden uprising of this brood of
-bankocrats, financiers, rentiers, brokers, stock-jobbers, &c., is proved by the writings of that time,
-e.g., by Bolingbroke’s.8
-With the national debt arose an international credit system, which often conceals one of the
-sources of primitive accumulation in this or that people. Thus the villainies of the Venetian
-thieving system formed one of the secret bases of the capital-wealth of Holland to whom Venice
-in her decadence lent large sums of money. So also was it with Holland and England. By the
-beginning of the 18th century the Dutch manufactures were far outstripped. Holland had ceased
-to be the nation preponderant in commerce and industry. One of its main lines of business,
-therefore, from 1701-1776, is the lending out of enormous amounts of capital, especially to its
-great rival England. The same thing is going on today between England and the United States. A
-great deal of capital, which appears today in the United States without any certificate of birth, was
-yesterday, in England, the capitalised blood of children.
-As the national debt finds its support in the public revenue, which must cover the yearly
-payments for interest, &c., the modern system of taxation was the necessary complement of the
-system of national loans. The loans enable the government to meet extraordinary expenses,
-without the tax-payers feeling it immediately, but they necessitate, as a consequence, increased
-taxes. On the other hand, the raising of taxation caused by the accumulation of debts contracted
-one after another, compels the government always to have recourse to new loans for new
-extraordinary expenses. Modern fiscality, whose pivot is formed by taxes on the most necessary
-means of subsistence (thereby increasing their price), thus contains within itself the germ of
-automatic progression. Overtaxation is not an incident, but rather a principle. In Holland,
-therefore, where this system was first inaugurated, the great patriot, DeWitt, has in his “Maxims”
-extolled it as the best system for making the wage labourer submissive, frugal, industrious, and
-overburdened with labour. The destructive influence that it exercises on the condition of the wage
-labourer concerns us less however, here, than the forcible expropriation, resulting from it, of
-peasants, artisans, and in a word, all elements of the lower middle class. On this there are not two
-opinions, even among the bourgeois economists. Its expropriating efficacy is still further
-heightened by the system of protection, which forms one of its integral parts.
-The great part that the public debt, and the fiscal system corresponding with it, has played in the
-capitalisation of wealth and the expropriation of the masses, has led many writers, like Cobbett,
-535 Chapter 31
-Doubleday and others, to seek in this, incorrectly, the fundamental cause of the misery of the
-modern peoples.
-The system of protection was an artificial means of manufacturing manufacturers, of
-expropriating independent labourers, of capitalising the national means of production and
-subsistence, of forcibly abbreviating the transition from the medieval to the modern mode of
-production. The European states tore one another to pieces about the patent of this invention, and,
-once entered into the service of the surplus-value makers, did not merely lay under contribution in
-the pursuit of this purpose their own people, indirectly through protective duties, directly through
-export premiums. They also forcibly rooted out, in their dependent countries, all industry, as, e.g.,
-England did. with the Irish woollen manufacture. On the continent of Europe, after Colbert’s
-example, the process was much simplified. The primitive industrial capital, here, came in part
-directly out of the state treasury. “Why,” cries Mirabeau, “why go so far to seek the cause of the
-manufacturing glory of Saxony before the war? 180,000,000 of debts contracted by the
-sovereigns!”9
-Colonial system, public debts, heavy taxes, protection, commercial wars, &c., these children of
-the true manufacturing period, increase gigantically during the infancy of Modem Industry. The
-birth of the latter is heralded by a great slaughter of the innocents. Like the royal navy, the
-factories were recruited by means of the press-gang. Blasé as Sir F. M. Eden is as to the horrors
-of the expropriation of the agricultural population from the soil, from the last third of the 15th
-century to his own time; with all the self-satisfaction with which he rejoices in this process,
-“essential” for establishing capitalistic agriculture and “the due proportion between arable and
-pasture land” – he does not show, however, the same economic insight in respect to the necessity
-of child-stealing and child-slavery for the transformation of manufacturing exploitation into
-factory exploitation, and the establishment of the “true relation” between capital and labour-
-power. He says:
-“It may, perhaps, be worthy the attention of the public to consider, whether any
-manufacture, which, in order to be carried on successfully, requires that cottages
-and workhouses should be ransacked for poor children; that they should be
-employed by turns during the greater part of the night and robbed of that rest
-which, though indispensable to all, is most required by the young; and that
-numbers of both sexes, of different ages and dispositions, should be collected
-together in such a manner that the contagion of example cannot but lead to
-profligacy and debauchery; will add to the sum of individual or national
-felicity?”10
-“In the counties of Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, and more particularly in
-Lancashire,” says Fielden, “the newly-invented machinery was used in large
-factories built on the sides of streams capable of turning the water-wheel.
-Thousands of hands were suddenly required in these places, remote from towns;
-and Lancashire, in particular, being, till then, comparatively thinly populated and
-barren, a population was all that she now wanted. The small and nimble fingers of
-little children being by very far the most in request, the custom instantly sprang up
-of procuring apprentices from the different parish workhouses of London,
-Birmingham, and elsewhere. Many, many thousands of these little, hapless
-creatures were sent down into the north, being from the age of 7 to the age of 13
-or 14 years old. The custom was for the master to clothe his apprentices and to
-feed and lodge them in an “apprentice house” near the factory; overseers were
-appointed to see to the works, whose interest it was to work the children to the
-utmost, because their pay was in proportion to the quantity of work that they could
-536 Chapter 31
-exact. Cruelty was, of course, the consequence. ... In many of the manufacturing
-districts, but particularly, I am afraid, in the guilty county to which I belong
-[Lancashire], cruelties the most heart-rending were practised upon the
-unoffending and friendless creatures who were thus consigned to the charge of
-master-manufacturers; they were harassed to the brink of death by excess of
-labour ... were flogged, fettered and tortured in the most exquisite refinement of
-cruelty; ... they were in many cases starved to the bone while flogged to their
-work and ... even in some instances ... were driven to commit suicide.... The
-beautiful and romantic valleys of Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire and Lancashire,
-secluded from the public eye, became the dismal solitudes of torture, and of many
-a murder. The profits of manufacturers were enormous; but this only whetted the
-appetite that it should have satisfied, and therefore the manufacturers had recourse
-to an expedient that seemed to secure to them those profits without any possibility
-of limit; they began the practice of what is termed “night-working,” that is, having
-tired one set of hands, by working them throughout the day, they had another set
-ready to go on working throughout the night; the day-set getting into the beds that
-the night-set had just quitted, and in their turn again, the night-set getting into the
-beds that the day-set quitted in the morning. It is a common tradition in
-Lancashire, that the beds never get cold.” 11
-With the development of capitalist production during the manufacturing period, the public
-opinion of Europe had lost the last remnant of shame and conscience. The nations bragged
-cynically of every infamy that served them as a means to capitalistic accumulation. Read, e.g., the
-naïve Annals of Commerce of the worthy A. Anderson. Here it is trumpeted forth as a triumph of
-English statecraft that at the Peace of Utrecht, England extorted from the Spaniards by the
-Asiento Treaty the privilege of being allowed to ply the negro trade, until then only carried on
-between Africa and the English West Indies, between Africa and Spanish America as well.
-England thereby acquired the right of supplying Spanish America until 1743 with 4,800 negroes
-yearly. This threw, at the same time, an official cloak over British smuggling. Liverpool waxed
-fat on the slave trade. This was its method of primitive accumulation. And, even to the present
-day, Liverpool “respectability” is the Pindar of the slave trade which – compare the work of
-Aikin [1795] already quoted – “has coincided with that spirit of bold adventure which has
-characterised the trade of Liverpool and rapidly carried it to its present state of prosperity; has
-occasioned vast employment for shipping and sailors, and greatly augmented the demand for the
-manufactures of the country” (p. 339). Liverpool employed in the slave-trade, in 1730, 15 ships;
-in 1751, 53; in 1760, 74; in 1770, 96; and in 1792, 132.12
-Whilst the cotton industry introduced child-slavery in England, it gave in the United States a
-stimulus to the transformation of the earlier, more or less patriarchal slavery, into a system of
-commercial exploitation. In fact, the veiled slavery of the wage workers in Europe needed, for its
-pedestal, slavery pure and simple in the new world.
-Tantae molis erat, to establish the “eternal laws of Nature” of the capitalist mode of production, to
-complete the process of separation between labourers and conditions of labour, to transform, at
-one pole, the social means of production and subsistence into capital, at the opposite pole, the
-mass of the population into wage labourers, into “free labouring poor,” that artificial product of
-modern society.13 If money, according to Augier,14 “comes into the world with a congenital
-blood-stain on one cheek,” capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood
-and dirt.15
-537 Chapter 31
-* Industrial here in contradistinction to agricultural. In the “categoric” sense the farmer is an industrial
-capitalist as much as the manufacturer.
-2 “The Natural and Artificial Rights of Property Contrasted.” Lond., 1832, pp. 98-99. Author of the
-anonymous work: “Th. Hodgskin.”
-3 Even as late as 1794, the small cloth-makers of Leeds sent a deputation to Parliament, with a petition
-for a law to forbid any merchant from becoming a manufacturer. (Dr. Aikin, l. c.)
-4 William Howitt: “Colonisation and Christianity: A Popular History of the Treatment of the Natives
-by the Europeans in all their Colonies.” London, 1838, p. 9. On the treatment of the slaves there is a
-good compilation in Charles Comte, “Traité de la Législation.” 3me éd. Bruxelles, 1837. This subject
-one must study in detail, to see what the bourgeoisie makes of itself and of the labourer, wherever it
-can, without restraint, model the world after its own image.
-5 Thomas Stamford Raffles, late Lieut-Gov. of that island: “The History of Java,” Lond., 1817.
-6 In the year 1866 more than a million Hindus died of hunger in the province of Orissa alone.
-Nevertheless, the attempt was made to enrich the Indian treasury by the price at which the necessaries
-of life were sold to the starving people.
-7 William Cobbett remarks that in England all public institutions are designated “royal”; as
-compensation for this, however, there is the “national” debt.
-8 “Si les Tartares inondaient l’Europe aujourd’hui, il faudrait bien des affaires pour leur faire entendre
-ce que c’est qu’un financier parmi nous.” [if the Tartars were to flood into Europe today, it would be a
-difficult job to make them understand what a financier is with us] Montesquieu, “Esprit des lois,” t.
-iv., p. 33, ed. Londres, 1769.
-9 Mirabeau, l. c., t. vi., p. 101.
-10 Eden, l. c., Vol. I., Book II., Ch. 1., p. 421.
-11 John Fielden, l. c., pp. 5, 6. On the earlier infamies of the factory system, cf. Dr. Aikin (1795), l. c.,
-p. 219. and Gisborne: “Enquiry into the Duties of Men,” 1795 Vol. II. When the steam-engine
-transplanted the factories from the country waterfalls to the middle of towns, the “abstemious”
-surplus-value maker found the child-material ready to his hand, without being forced to seek slaves
-from the workhouses. When Sir R. Peel (father of the “minister of plausibility"), brought in his bill for
-the protection of children, in 1815, Francis Homer, lumen of the Billion Committee and intimate
-friend of Ricardo, said in the House of Commons: “It is notorious, that with a bankrupt’s effects, a
-gang, if he might use the word, of these children had been put up to sale, and were advertised publicly
-as part of the property. A most atrocious instance had been brought before the Court of King’s Bench
-two years before, in which a number of these boys, apprenticed by a parish in London to one
-manufacturer, had been transferred to another, and had been found by some benevolent persons in a
-state of absolute famine. Another case more horrible had come to his knowledge while on a
-[Parliamentary] Committee ... that not many years ago, an agreement had been made between a
-London parish and a Lancashire manufacturer, by which it was stipulated, that with every 20 sound
-children one idiot should be taken.”
-12 In 1790, there were in the English West Indies ten slaves for one free man, in the French fourteen
-for one, in the Dutch twenty-three for one. (Henry Brougham: “An Inquiry into the Colonial Policy of
-the European Powers.” Edin. 1803, vol. II., p. 74.)
-13 The phrase, “labouring poor,” is found in English legislation from the moment when the class of
-wage labourers becomes noticeable. This term is used in opposition, on the one hand, to the “idle
-poor,” beggars, etc., on the. out and out vulgar bourgeois. “The laws of commerce are the laws of
-Nature, and therefore the laws of God.” (E. Burke, l. c., pp. 31, 32.) No wonder that, true to the laws
-of God and of Nature, he always sold himself in the best market. A very good portrait of this Edmund
-Burke, during his liberal time, is to be found in the writings of the Rev. Mr. Tucker. Tucker was a
-parson and a Tory, but, for the rest, an honourable man and a competent political economist. In face of
-538 Chapter 31
-the infamous cowardice of character that reigns today, and believes most devoutly in “the laws of
-commerce,” it is our bounden duty again and again to brand the Burkes, who only differ from their
-successors in one thing — talent.
-14 Marie Angier: “Du Crédit Public.” Paris, 1842.
-15 “Capital is said by a Quarterly Reviewer to fly turbulence and strife, and to be timid, which is very
-true; but this is very incompletely stating the question. Capital eschews no profit, or very small profit,
-just as Nature was formerly said to abhor a vacuum. With adequate profit, capital is very bold. A
-certain 10 per cent. will ensure its employment anywhere; 20 per cent. certain will produce eagerness;
-50 per cent., positive audacity; 100 per cent. will make it ready to trample on all human laws; 300 per
-cent., and there is not a crime at which it will scruple, nor a risk it will not run, even to the chance of
-its owner being hanged. If turbulence and strife will bring a profit, it will freely encourage both.
-Smuggling and the slave-trade have amply proved all that is here stated.” (T. J. Dunning, l. c., pp. 35,
-36.)
-Chapter 32: Historical Tendency of Capitalist
-Accumulation
-What does the primitive accumulation of capital, i.e., its historical genesis, resolve itself into? In
-so far as it is not immediate transformation of slaves and serfs into wage labourers, and therefore
-a mere change of form, it only means the expropriation of the immediate producers, i.e., the
-dissolution of private property based on the labour of its owner. Private property, as the antithesis
-to social, collective property, exists only where the means of labour and the external conditions of
-labour belong to private individuals. But according as these private individuals are labourers or
-not labourers, private property has a different character. The numberless shades, that it at first
-sight presents, correspond to the intermediate stages lying between these two extremes. The
-private property of the labourer in his means of production is the foundation of petty industry,
-whether agricultural, manufacturing, or both; petty industry, again, is an essential condition for
-the development of social production and of the free individuality of the labourer himself. Of
-course, this petty mode of production exists also under slavery, serfdom, and other states of
-dependence. But it flourishes, it lets loose its whole energy, it attains its adequate classical form,
-only where the labourer is the private owner of his own means of labour set in action by himself:
-the peasant of the land which he cultivates, the artisan of the tool which he handles as a virtuoso.
-This mode of production presupposes parcelling of the soil and scattering of the other means of
-production. As it excludes the concentration of these means of production, so also it excludes co-
-operation, division of labour within each separate process of production, the control over, and the
-productive application of the forces of Nature by society, and the free development of the social
-productive powers. It is compatible only with a system of production, and a society, moving
-within narrow and more or less primitive bounds. To perpetuate it would be, as Pecqueur rightly
-says, “to decree universal mediocrity". At a certain stage of development, it brings forth the
-material agencies for its own dissolution. From that moment new forces and new passions spring
-up in the bosom of society; but the old social organisation fetters them and keeps them down. It
-must be annihilated; it is annihilated. Its annihilation, the transformation of the individualised and
-scattered means of production into socially concentrated ones, of the pigmy property of the many
-into the huge property of the few, the expropriation of the great mass of the people from the soil,
-from the means of subsistence, and from the means of labour, this fearful and painful
-expropriation of the mass of the people forms the prelude to the history of capital. It comprises a
-series of forcible methods, of which we have passed in review only those that have been epoch-
-making as methods of the primitive accumulation of capital. The expropriation of the immediate
-producers was accomplished with merciless Vandalism, and under the stimulus of passions the
-most infamous, the most sordid, the pettiest, the most meanly odious. Self-earned private
-property, that is based, so to say, on the fusing together of the isolated, independent labouring
-individual with the conditions of his labour, is supplanted by capitalistic private property, which
-rests on exploitation of the nominally free labour of others, i.e., on wage labour.1
-As soon as this process of transformation has sufficiently decomposed the old society from top to
-bottom, as soon as the labourers are turned into proletarians, their means of labour into capital, as
-soon as the capitalist mode of production stands on its own feet, then the further socialisation of
-labour and further transformation of the land and other means of production into socially
-exploited and, therefore, common means of production, as well as the further expropriation of
-private proprietors, takes a new form. That which is now to be expropriated is no longer the
-labourer working for himself, but the capitalist exploiting many labourers. This expropriation is
-accomplished by the action of the immanent laws of capitalistic production itself, by the
-centralisation of capital. One capitalist always kills many. Hand in hand with this centralisation,
-or this expropriation of many capitalists by few, develop, on an ever-extending scale, the co-
-operative form of the labour process, the conscious technical application of science, the
-methodical cultivation of the soil, the transformation of the instruments of labour into instruments
-of labour only usable in common, the economising of all means of production by their use as
-means of production of combined, socialised labour, the entanglement of all peoples in the net of
-the world market, and with this, the international character of the capitalistic regime. Along with
-the constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolise all
-advantages of this process of transformation, grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery,
-degradation, exploitation; but with this too grows the revolt of the working class, a class always
-increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organised by the very mechanism of the process of
-capitalist production itself. The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of
-production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Centralisation of the
-means of production and socialisation of labour at last reach a point where they become
-incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of
-capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.
-The capitalist mode of appropriation, the result of the capitalist mode of production, produces
-capitalist private property. This is the first negation of individual private property, as founded on
-the labour of the proprietor. But capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of
-Nature, its own negation. It is the negation of negation. This does not re-establish private property
-for the producer, but gives him individual property based on the acquisition of the capitalist era:
-i.e., on co-operation and the possession in common of the land and of the means of production.
-The transformation of scattered private property, arising from individual labour, into capitalist
-private property is, naturally, a process, incomparably more protracted, violent, and difficult, than
-the transformation of capitalistic private property, already practically resting on socialised
-production, into socialised property. In the former case, we had the expropriation of the mass of
-the people by a few usurpers; in the latter, we have the expropriation of a few usurpers by the
-mass of the people.2
-1 “Nous sommes dans une condition tout-à-fait nouvelle de la societé... nous tendons a séparer toute
-espèce de propriété d’avec toute espèce de travail.” [We are in a situation which is entirely new for
-society ... we are striving to separate every kind of property from every kind of labour] (Sismondi:
-“Nouveaux Principes d’Econ. Polit.” t.II, p.434.)
-2 The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the
-labourers, due to competition, by their revolutionary combination, due to association. The
-development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the
-bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all,
-are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.... Of all the
-classes that stand face-to-face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary
-class. The other classes perish and disappear in the face of Modern Industry, the proletariat is its
-special and essential product.... The lower middle classes, the small manufacturers, the shopkeepers,
-the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence
-as fractions of the middle class... they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history.
-Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei,” London, 1848, pp. 9, 11.
-Chapter 33: The Modern Theory of Colonisation1
-Political economy confuses on principle two very different kinds of private property, of which
-one rests on the producers’ own labour, the other on the employment of the labour of others. It
-forgets that the latter not only is the direct antithesis of the former, but absolutely grows on its
-tomb only. In Western Europe, the home of Political Economy, the process of primitive
-accumulation is more of less accomplished. Here the capitalist regime has either directly
-conquered the whole domain of national production, or, where economic conditions are less
-developed, it, at least, indirectly controls those strata of society which, though belonging to the
-antiquated mode of production, continue to exist side by side with it in gradual decay. To this
-ready-made world of capital, the political economist applies the notions of law and of property
-inherited from a pre-capitalistic world with all the more anxious zeal and all the greater unction,
-the more loudly the facts cry out in the face of his ideology. It is otherwise in the colonies. There
-the capitalist regime everywhere comes into collision with the resistance of the producer, who, as
-owner of his own conditions of labour, employs that labour to enrich himself, instead of the
-capitalist. The contradiction of these two diametrically opposed economic systems, manifests
-itself here practically in a struggle between them. Where the capitalist has at his back the power
-of the mother-country, he tries to clear out of his way by force the modes of production and
-appropriation based on the independent labour of the producer. The same interest, which compels
-the sycophant of capital, the political economist, in the mother-country, to proclaim the
-theoretical identity of the capitalist mode of production with its contrary, that same interest
-compels him in the colonies to make a clean breast of it, and to proclaim aloud the antagonism of
-the two modes of production. To this end, he proves how the development of the social
-productive power of labour, co-operation, division of labour, use of machinery on a large scale,
-&c., are impossible without the expropriation of the labourers, and the corresponding
-transformation of their means of production into capital. In the interest of the so-called national
-wealth, he seeks for artificial means to ensure the poverty of the people. Here his apologetic
-armor crumbles off, bit by bit, like rotten touchwood. It is the great merit of E.G. Wakefield to
-have discovered, not anything new about the Colonies2, but to have discovered in the Colonies
-the truth as to the conditions of capitalist production in the mother country. As the system of
-protection at its origin3 attempted to manufacture capitalists artificially in the mother-country, so
-Wakefield’s colonisation theory, which England tried for a time to enforce by Acts of Parliament,
-attempted to effect the manufacture of wage-workers in the Colonies. This he calls “systematic
-colonisation.”
-First of all, Wakefield discovered that in the Colonies, property in money, means of subsistence,
-machines, and other means of production, does not as yet stamp a man as a capitalist if there be
-wanting the correlative – the wage-worker, the other man who is compelled to sell himself of his
-own free will. He discovered that capital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons,
-established by the instrumentality of things.4 Mr. Peel, he moans, took with him from England to
-Swan River, West Australia, means of subsistence and of production to the amount of £50,000.
-Mr. Peel had the foresight to bring with him, besides, 300 persons of the working class, men,
-women, and children. Once arrived at his destination, “Mr. Peel was left without a servant to
-make his bed or fetch him water from the river.”5 Unhappy Mr. Peel who provided for everything
-except the export of English modes of production to Swan River!
-For the understanding of the following discoveries of Wakefield, two preliminary remarks: We
-know that the means of production and subsistence, while they remain the property of the
-immediate producer, are not capital. They become capital only under circumstances in which they
-542 Chapter 33
-serve at the same time as means of exploitation and subjection of the labourer. But this capitalist
-soul of theirs is so intimately wedded, in the head of the political economist, to their material
-substance, that he christens them capital under all circumstances, even when they are its exact
-opposite. Thus is it with Wakefield. Further: the splitting up of the means of production into the
-individual property of many independent labourers, working on their own account, he calls equal
-division of capital. It is with the political economist as with the feudal jurist. The latter stuck on to
-pure monetary relations the labels supplied by feudal law.
-“If,” says Wakefield, “all members of the society are supposed to possess equal portions of
-capital... no man would have a motive for accumulating more capital than he could use with his
-own hands. This is to some extent the case in new American settlements, where a passion for
-owning land prevents the existence of a class of labourers for hire.”6 So long, therefore, as the
-labourer can accumulate for himself – and this he can do so long as he remains possessor of his
-means of production – capitalist accumulation and the capitalistic mode of production are
-impossible. The class of wage labourers, essential to these, is wanting. How, then, in old Europe,
-was the expropriation of the labourer from his conditions of labour, i.e., the co-existence of
-capital and wage labour, brought about? By a social contract of a quite original kind. “Mankind
-have adopted a... simple contrivance for promoting the accumulation of capital,” which, of
-course, since the time of Adam, floated in their imagination, floated in their imagination as the
-sole and final end of their existence: “they have divided themselves into owners of capital and
-owners of labour.... The division was the result of concert and combination.”7 In one word: the
-mass of mankind expropriated itself in honour of the “accumulation of capital.” Now, one would
-think that this instinct of self-denying fanaticism would give itself full fling especially in the
-Colonies, where alone exist the men and conditions that could turn a social contract from a dream
-to a reality. But why, then, should “systematic colonisation” be called in to replace its opposite,
-spontaneous, unregulated colonisation? But ‒ but ‒ “In the Northern States of the American
-Union; it may be doubted whether so many as a tenth of the people would fall under the
-description of hired labourers.... In England... the labouring class compose the bulk of the
-people.”8 Nay, the impulse to self-expropriation on the part of labouring humanity for the glory of
-capital, exists so little that slavery, according to Wakefield himself, is the sole natural basis of
-Colonial wealth. His systematic colonisation is a mere pis aller, since he unfortunately has to do
-with free men, not with slaves. “The first Spanish settlers in Saint Domingo did not obtain
-labourers from Spain. But, without labourers, their capital must have perished, or at least, must
-soon have been diminished to that small amount which each individual could employ with his
-own hands. This has actually occurred in the last Colony founded by England – the Swan River
-Settlement – where a great mass of capital, of seeds, implements, and cattle, has perished for want
-of labourers to use it, and where no settler has preserved much more capital than he can employ
-with his own hands.” 9
-We have seen that the expropriation of the mass of the people from the soil forms the basis of the
-capitalist mode of production. The essence of a free colony, on the contrary, consists in this – that
-the bulk of the soil is still public property, and every settler on it therefore can turn part of it into
-his private property and individual means of production, without hindering the later settlers in the
-same operation.10 This is the secret both of the prosperity of the colonies and of their inveterate
-vice – opposition to the establishment of capital. “Where land is very cheap and all men are free,
-where every one who so pleases can easily obtain a piece of land for himself, not only is labour
-very dear, as respects the labourer’s share of the produce, but the difficulty is to obtain combined
-labour at any price.”11
-As in the colonies the separation of the labourer from the conditions of labour and their root, the
-soil, does not exist, or only sporadically, or on too limited a scale, so neither does the separation
-of agriculture from industry exist, nor the destruction of the household industry of the peasantry.
-543 Chapter 33
-Whence then is to come the internal market for capital? “No part of the population of America is
-exclusively agricultural, excepting slaves and their employers who combine capital and labour in
-particular works. Free Americans, who cultivate the soil, follow many other occupations. Some
-portion of the furniture and tools which they use is commonly made by themselves. They
-frequently build their own houses, and carry to market, at whatever distance, the produce of their
-own industry. They are spinners and weavers; they make soap and candles, as well as, in many
-cases, shoes and clothes for their own use. In America the cultivation of land is often the
-secondary pursuit of a blacksmith, a miller or a shopkeeper.”12 With such queer people as these,
-where is the “field of abstinence” for the capitalists?
-The great beauty of capitalist production consists in this – that it not only constantly reproduces
-the wage-worker as wage-worker, but produces always, in proportion to the accumulation of
-capital, a relative surplus-population of wage-workers. Thus the law of supply and demand of
-labour is kept in the right rut, the oscillation of wages is penned within limits satisfactory to
-capitalist exploitation, and lastly, the social dependence of the labourer on the capitalist, that
-indispensable requisite, is secured; an unmistakable relation of dependence, which the smug
-political economist, at home, in the mother-country, can transmogrify into one of free contract
-between buyer and seller, between equally independent owners of commodities, the owner of the
-commodity capital and the owner of the commodity labour. But in the colonies, this pretty fancy
-is torn asunder. The absolute population here increases much more quickly than in the mother-
-country, because many labourers enter this world as ready-made adults, and yet the labour-market
-is always understocked. The law of supply and demand of labour falls to pieces. On the one hand,
-the old world constantly throws in capital, thirsting after exploitation and “abstinence”; on the
-other, the regular reproduction of the wage labourer as wage labourer comes into collision with
-impediments the most impertinent and in part invincible. What becomes of the production of
-wage-labourers, supernumerary in proportion to the accumulation of capital? The wage-worker of
-to-day is to-morrow an independent peasant, or artisan, working for himself. He vanishes from
-the labour-market, but not into the workhouse. This constant transformation of the wage-
-labourers into independent producers, who work for themselves instead of for capital, and enrich
-themselves instead of the capitalist gentry, reacts in its turn very perversely on the conditions of
-the labour-market. Not only does the degree of exploitation of the wage labourer remain
-indecently low. The wage labourer loses into the bargain, along with the relation of dependence,
-also the sentiment of dependence on the abstemious capitalist. Hence all the inconveniences that
-our E. G. Wakefield pictures so doughtily, so eloquently, so pathetically. The supply of wage
-labour, he complains, is neither constant, nor regular, nor sufficient. “The supply of labour is
-always not only small but uncertain.”13 “Though the produce divided between the capitalist and
-the labourer be large, the labourer takes so great a share that he soon becomes a capitalist.... Few,
-even those whose lives are unusually long, can accumulate great masses of wealth.”14 The
-labourers most distinctly decline to allow the capitalist to abstain from the payment of the greater
-part of their labour. It avails him nothing, if he is so cunning as to import from Europe, with his
-own capital, his own wage-workers. They soon “cease... to be labourers for hire; they... become
-independent landowners, if not competitors with their former masters in the labour-market.”15
-Think of the horror! The excellent capitalist has imported bodily from Europe, with his own good
-money, his own competitors! The end of the world has come! No wonder Wakefield laments the
-absence of all dependence and of all sentiment of dependence on the part of the wage-workers in
-the colonies. On account of the high wages, says his disciple, Merivale, there is in the colonies
-“the urgent desire for cheaper and more subservient labourers – for a class to whom the capitalist
-might dictate terms, instead of being dictated to by them.... In ancient civilised countries the
-labourer, though free, is by a law of Nature dependent on capitalists; in colonies this dependence
-must be created by artificial means.”16
-544 Chapter 33
-What is now, according to Wakefield, the consequence of this unfortunate state of things in the
-colonies? A “barbarising tendency of dispersion” of producers and national wealth.17 The
-parcelling-out of the means of production among innumerable owners, working on their own
-account, annihilates, along with the centralisation of capital, all the foundation of combined
-labour. Every long-winded undertaking, extending over several years and demanding outlay of
-fixed capital, is prevented from being carried out. In Europe, capital invests without hesitating a
-moment, for the working class constitutes its living appurtenance, always in excess, always at
-disposal. But in the colonies! Wakefield tells an extremely doleful anecdote. He was talking with
-some capitalists of Canada and the state of New York, where the immigrant wave often becomes
-stagnant and deposits a sediment of “supernumerary” labourers. “Our capital,” says one of the
-characters in the melodrama, "was ready for many operations which require a considerable period
-of time for their completion; but we could not begin such operations with labour which, we knew,
-would soon leave us. If we had been sure of retaining the labour of such emigrants, we should
-have been glad to have engaged it at once, and for a high price: and we should have engaged it,
-even though we had been sure it would leave us, provided we had been sure of a fresh supply
-whenever we might need it.”18
-After Wakefield has constructed the English capitalist agriculture and its “combined” labour with
-the scattered cultivation of American peasants, he unwittingly gives us a glimpse at the reverse of
-the medal. He depicts the mass of the American people as well-to-do, independent, enterprising,
-and comparatively cultured, whilst “the English agricultural labourer is miserable wretch, a
-pauper.... In what country, except North America and some new colonies, do the wages of free
-labour employed in agriculture much exceed a bare subsistence for the labourer? ... Undoubtedly ,
-farm-horses in England, being a valuable property, are better fed than English peasants.”19 But,
-never mind, national wealth is, once again, by its very nature, identical with misery of the people.
-How, then, to heal the anti-capitalistic cancer of the colonies? If men were willing, at a blow, to
-turn all the soil from public into private property, they would destroy certainly the root of the evil,
-but also – the colonies. The trick is how to kill two birds with one stone. Let the Government put
-upon the virgin soil an artificial price, independent of the law of supply and demand, a price that
-compels the immigrant to work a long time for wages before he can earn enough money to buy
-land, and turn himself into an independent peasant.20 The fund resulting from the sale of land at a
-price relatively prohibitory for the wage-workers, this fund of money extorted from the wages of
-labour by violation of the sacred law of supply and demand, the Government is to employ, on the
-other hand, in proportion as it grows; to import have-nothings from Europe into the colonies, and
-thus keep the wage labour market full for the capitalists. Under these circumstances, tout sera
-pour le mieux dans le meilleur des mondes possibles. This is the great secret of “systematic
-colonisation.” By this plan, Wakefield cries in triumph, “the supply of labour must be constant
-and regular, because, first, as no labourer would be able to procure land until he had worked for
-money, all immigrant labourers, working for a time for wages and in combination, would produce
-capital for the employment of more labourers; secondly, because every labourer who left off
-working for wages and became a landowner would, by purchasing land, provide a fund for
-bringing fresh labour to the colony.” 21The price of the soil imposed by the State must, of course,
-be a “sufficient price” – i.e., so high “as to prevent the labourers from becoming independent
-landowners until others had followed to take their place.”22 This “sufficient price for the land” is
-nothing but a euphemistic circumlocution for the ransom which the labourer pays to the capitalist
-for leave to retire from the wage labour market to the land. First, he must create for the capitalist
-“capital,” with which the latter may be able to exploit more labourers; then he must place, at his
-own expense, a locum tenens [placeholder] on the labour market, whom the Government
-forwards across the sea for the benefit of his old master, the capitalist.
-545 Chapter 33
-It is very characteristic that the English Government for years practised this method of “primitive
-accumulation” prescribed by Mr. Wakefield expressly for the use of the colonies. The fiasco was,
-of course, as complete as that of Sir Robert Peel’s Bank Act. The stream of emigration was only
-diverted from the English colonies to the United States. Meanwhile, the advance of capitalistic
-production in Europe, accompanied by increasing Government pressure, has rendered
-Wakefield’s recipe superfluous. On the one hand, the enormous and ceaseless stream of men,
-year after year driven upon America, leaves behind a stationary sediment in the east of the United
-States, the wave of immigration from Europe throwing men on the labour-market there more
-rapidly than the wave of emigration westwards can wash them away. On the other hand, the
-American Civil War brought in its train a colossal national debt, and, with it, pressure of taxes,
-the rise of the vilest financial aristocracy, the squandering of a huge part of the public land on
-speculative companies for the exploitation of railways, mines, &c., in brief, the most rapid
-centralisation of capital. The great republic has, therefore, ceased to be the promised land for
-emigrant labourers. Capitalistic production advances there with giant strides, even though the
-lowering of wages and the dependence of the wage-worker are yet far from being brought down
-to the normal European level. The shameless lavishing of uncultivated colonial land on aristocrats
-and capitalists by the Government, so loudly denounced even by Wakefield, has produced,
-especially in Australia23, in conjunction with the stream of men that the gold diggings attract, and
-with the competition that the importation of English-commodities causes even to the smallest
-artisan, an ample “relative surplus labouring population,” so that almost every mail brings the
-Job’s news of a “glut of the Australia labour-market,” and the prostitution in some places
-flourishes as wantonly as in the London Haymarket.
-However, we are not concerned here with the conditions of the colonies. The only thing that
-interests us is the secret discovered in the new world by the Political Economy of the old world,
-and proclaimed on the housetops: that 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.
-End of Book I
-1 We treat here of real Colonies, virgins soils, colonized by free immigrants. The United States are,
-speaking economically, still only a Colony of Europe. Besides, to this category belong such old
-plantations as those in which the abolition of slavery has completely altered the earlier conditions.
-2 Wakefield’s few glimpses on the subject of Modern Colonisation are fully anticipated by Mirabeau
-Pere, the physiocrat, and even much earlier by English economists.
-3 Later, it became a temporary necessity in the international competitive struggle. But, whatever its
-motive, the consequences remain the same.
-4 “A negro is a negro. In certain circumstances he becomes a slave. A mule is a machine for spinning
-cotton. Only under certain circumstances does it become capital. Outside these circumstances, it is no
-more capital than gold is intrinsically money, or sugar is the price of sugar.... Capital is a social
-relation of production. It is a historical relation of production.” (Karl Marx, “Lohnarbeit und Kapital,”
-N. Rh. Z., No.266, April 7, 1849.)
-5 E. G. Wakefield: “England and America,” vol.ii. p.33.
-6 l.c., p.17.
-7 l.c., vol.i, p.18.
-8 l.c., pp.42, 43, 44.
-546 Chapter 33
-9 l.c., vol.ii, p.5.
-10 “Land, to be an element of colonisation, must not only be waste, but it must be public property,
-liable to be converted into private property.” (l.c., Vol.II, p.125.)
-11 l.c., Vol.I, p.247.
-12 l.c., pp.21, 22.
-13 l.c., Vol.II, p.116
-14 l.c., Vol.I, p.131.
-15 l.c., Vol.II, p.5.
-16 Merivale, l.c., Vol.II, pp.235-314 passim. Even the mild, Free Trade, vulgar economist, Molinari,
-says: “Dans les colonies où l’esclavage a été aboli sans que le travail forcé se trouvait remplacé par
-une quantité équivalente de travail libre, on a vu s’opérer la contre-partie du fait qui se réalise tous les
-jours sous nos yeux. On a vu les simples travailleurs exploiter à leur tour les entrepreneurs d’industrie,
-exiger d’eux des salaires hors de toute proportion avec la part légitime qui leur revenait dans le
-produit. Les planteurs, ne pouvant obtenir de leurs sucres un prix suffisant pour couvrir la hausse de
-salaire, ont été obligés de fournir l’excédant, d’abord sur leurs profits, ensuite sur leurs capitaux
-mêmes. Une foule de planteurs ont été ruinés de la sorte, d’autres ont fermé leurs ateliers pour
-échapper à une ruine imminente.... Sans doute, il vaut mieux voir périr des accumulations de capitaux
-que des générations d’hommes [how generous Mr. Molinari!]: mais ne vaudrait-il pas mieux que ni les
-uns ni les autres périssent? [In the colonies where slavery has been abolished without the compulsory
-labour being replaced with an equivalent quantity of free labour, there has occurred the opposite of
-what happens every day before our eyes. Simple workers have been seen to exploit in their turn the
-industrial entrepreneurs, demanding from them wages which bear absolutely no relation to the
-legitimate share in the product which they ought to receive. The planters were unable to obtain for
-their sugar for a sufficent price to cover the increase in wages, and were obliged to furnish the extra
-amount, at first out of their profits, and then out of their very capital. A considerable amount of
-planters have been ruined as a result, while others have closed down their businesses in order to avoid
-the ruin which threatened them ... It is doubtless better that these accumulations of capital should be
-destroyed than that generations of men should perish ... but would it not be better if both survived?]
-(Molinari, l.c., pp.51,52.) Mr. Molinari, Mr. Molinari! What then becomes of the ten commandments,
-of Moses and the prophets, of the law of supply and demand, if in Europe the “entrepreneur” can cut
-down the labourer’s legitimate part, and in the West Indies, the labourer can cut down the
-entrepreneur’s? And what, if you please, is this “legitimate part,” which on your own showing the
-capitalist in Europe daily neglects to pay? Over yonder, in the colonies where the labourers are so
-“simple” as to “exploit” the capitalist, Mr. Molinari feels a strong itching to set the law of supply and
-demand, that works elsewhere automatically, on the right road by means of the police.
-17 Wakefield, l.c., Vol.II, p.52.
-18 l.c., pp.191, 192.
-19 l.c., Vol.I, p.47, 246.
-20 “C’est, ajoutez-vous, grâce à l’appropriation du sol et des capitaux que l’homme, qui n’a que ses
-bras, trouve de l’occupation et se fait un revenu... c’est au contraire, grâce à l’appropriation
-individuelle du sol qu’il se trouve des hommes n’ayant que leurs bras.... Quand vous mettez un
-homme dans le vide, vous vous emparez de l’atmosphère. Ainsi faites-vous, quand vous vous emparez
-du sol.... C’est le mettre dans le vide le richesses, pour ne la laisser vivre qu’à votre volonté.” [It is,
-you add, a result of the appropriation of the soil and of capital that the man who has nothing but the
-strength of his arms finds employment and creates an income for himself ... but the opposite is true, it
-is thanks to the individual appropriation of the soil that there exist men who only possess the strength
-of their arms. ... When you put a man in a vacuum, you rob him of the air. You do the same, when you
-547 Chapter 33
-take away the soil from him ... for you are putting him in a space void of wealth, so as to leave him no
-way of living except according to your wishes] (Collins, l.c. t.III, pp.268-71, passim.)
-21 Wakefield, l.c., Vol.II, p.192.
-22 l.c., p.45.
-23 As soon as Australia became her own law-giver, she passed, of course, laws favorable to the
-settlers, but the squandering of the land, already accomplished by the English Government, stands in
-the way. “The first and main object at which new Land Act of 1862 aims is to give increased facilities
-for the settlement of the people.” (“The Land Law of Victoria,” by the Hon. C. G. Duffy, Minister of
-Public Lands, Lond., 1862.)
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