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Title: Karl Marx’s *Capital*
Author: Carlo Cafiero
Date: 1879
Language: en
Topics: Marxism, scientific socialism
Source: Retrieved on 2020-07-31 from [[https://www.marxists.org/archive/cafiero/1879/summary-of-capital.htm]]
Notes: Translated by Paul M. Perrone in 2018. See this in Italian: https://www.marxists.org/italiano/marx-engels/1867/capitale/compendiocafiero.html.

Carlo Cafiero

Karl Marx’s *Capital*

Translator’s note

It’s with great pride and anticipation that I present this first

complete English translation of Carlo Cafiero’s summary of Karl Marx’s

Capital. My ultimate hope is that this work will further Cafiero’s

original goal in writing this book: to develop class consciousness and

the knowledge of basic Marxian economics among workers, activists, and

students. Given the length of Capital, Volume 1, those without the

adequate time or skill set may be put off in reading it in its entirety.

However, this summary, while not a substitute, is undoubtedly an

adequate primer. Not only is it an easily digestible length, but it

fully encapsulates the major points of Marx’s analysis of production,

accumulation of capital, and the exploitation of labor. Cafiero’s

dynamic and impassioned prose is sure to inspire a similar feeling in

the hearts of readers, and his inclusion of large portions of Marx’s

original volume can also better acquaint modern readers with the

masterful writing and research skills embodied in Marx.

For the translation of this work, I tried as best as possible to render

Cafiero’s writing as easy to comprehend in English while still

maintaining the intentions and structure from the original Italian

publication. When it came to the citations Cafiero included from Marx’s

Capital, instead of translating into English his Italian translations of

the French translations of the original German text, which I figured

would be far too contrived, I opted to cite the 1887 English

translation, directly from the German, by Samuel Moore and Edward

Averling (and notably edited by Friedrich Engels).[1] This way, I

ensured that Marx’s original words would be as accurate as possible. The

synthesis of the work done by both men is, I find, a comprehensive image

of the entire breadth of the original first volume of Capital.

Cafiero, now all but forgotten in English leftist circles, is worthy of

further study by those of us in the modern age. Born to a bourgeois

family in southern Italy in 1846, he was a devoted revolutionary who

furthered the cause of anarcho-communism in Italy during his short life.

After being arrested for helping to inspire a failed insurrection in

Benevento in 1877, Cafiero drafted his summary of Capital in prison.

First published in 1879, this work was highly praised, even by Marx,

whose opinion of the work can be read in the Appendix at the end of this

translation. Sadly, Cafiero’s life following this publication took a

turn for the worse; intermittent periods of exile and return to Italy

coincided with the development of a serious mental illness that caused

Cafiero to attempt suicide on several occasions. He died of tuberculosis

in a mental hospital in Italy in 1892 at only 45.

I therefore dedicate this first English translation of Carlo Cafiero’s

summary of Capital to Cafiero himself. In this day and age, 200 years

since the birth of Marx and 150 years since the publication of the first

volume of Capital, these ideas, and the understanding of them, are more

necessary than ever.

Paul M. Perrone

2018

Original Introduction to the Italian Online Publication

Marxists Internet Archive, 2008

Carlo Cafiero accomplished an important work in drafting this summary of

Capital, approved and looked over by experts and even by Marx himself,

not only because it is able to synthesize the thinking of the “master”

in a few pages, but also because it is able to convey Capital’s message

in an impassioned, yet concise, manner, in a tenacious and complete, as

well as illuminating, writing. It is not that this writing is sufficient

to ascertain all of the contents of that immense work and milestone that

is Marx’s Capital, but it certainly has the value and capacity to better

acquaint the reader with the universe of Marxist works, Capital

included; this is no small task in an age like ours, in which Marxism

unfortunately enjoys a lack of fame, due to the rule of bourgeois

capital and to so many preconceptions and false myths surrounding

communism.

One cannot blame communist groups and parties for this crisis, but above

all one can blame the historical and social doings that have

characterized the last twenty years, with the explosion of technology,

that has favored globalization and therefore a further reinforcement of

the bourgeoisie, which controls politics and media. It is exactly in

this context that, around two centuries later, the work that we have in

front of us gains tremendous truth, more than many contemporary

sociological writings.

Preface

Italy, March 1878

A profound feeling of sadness struck me, studying Capital, when I

thought that this work was, and who knows how much longer it would

remain, entirely unknown in Italy.

But if that is, I then said to myself, I want to say that my duty is to

work for all people, so that this would no longer be. And what to do? A

translation? Phew! That wouldn’t help at all. The people who can

understand the work of Marx, such that he has written, certainly know

French, and can make use of J. Roy’s beautiful translation, fully

reviewed by the author, who says it even deserves to be consulted by

those who speak the German language. It’s a very different group of

people for whom I must work. It’s divided into three categories: the

first is composed of workers gifted with intelligence and of a certain

education; the second, composed of young people who came out of the

bourgeoisie, and have embraced the cause of labor, but who for now don’t

have the set of studies or the sufficient intellectual development to

understand Capital in its original text; the third, finally, composed of

the youngest in schools, still of pure heart, who I can compare to a

beautiful nursery of still tender plants, but who will bear the best

fruits, if transplanted into fertile soil. My work must therefore be an

easy and brief summary of Marx’s book.

This book represents the new true, which completely demolishes, crushes,

and disperses to the winds a secular edifice of mistakes and lies. It is

all a war. A glorious war, and by the power of the enemy, and by the

even greater power of the captain, who undertook it with great

quantities of the newest weapons, tools and machinery of every sort,

which his genius had known how to portray from all the modern sciences.

My work is a great length shorter and more modest. I must only guide a

crowd of willing followers along the shortest and simplest path to the

temple of capital; and to tear down that god there, so that all can see

with their own eyes and touch with their own hands the elements of which

it is composed; and to rip off the vestments from the priests, so that

all can see the hidden stains of human blood, and the cruelest weapons,

with which they go about, every day, sacrificing an ever-growing number

of victims.

And with these intentions I prepare to work. Meanwhile Marx can fulfill

his promise, giving us the second volume of Capital, which will deal

with The Process of Circulation of Capital (book II), and with The

Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole (book III), and the fourth

and final volume which will explain A History of Economic Theories.

This first book of Capital, originally written in German and afterwards

translated into Russian and into French, is now briefly summarized in

Italian in the interests of the cause of labor. May the workers read it

and think about it carefully because in it is contained not only the

story of The Development of Capitalist Production, but also The

Martyrdom of the Worker.

And finally, I will also appeal to a class highly interested in the fact

of capitalist accumulation, i.e. to the class of small property holders.

How is it that this class, once so widespread in Italy, shrinks more and

more every day? The reason is very simple. Because since 1860 Italy has

set course with more alacrity down the path, which all modern nations

must necessarily travel; the path that leads to capitalist accumulation,

which has reached that classic form in England, which Italy wishes to

reach along with all other modern nations. May the small property

holders meditating on these pages about the history of England reported

in this book, meditating on capitalist accumulation, increased in Italy

by the usurpations of big property holders and by the liquidation of

ecclesiastical and state property, shake off the torpor that oppresses

their minds and hearts, and once and for all persuade themselves that

their cause is the cause of the workers, because they will all

inevitably be reduced, by modern capitalist accumulation, to this sad

condition: either sell themselves to the government for a loaf of bread,

or disappear forever within the dense rows of the proletariat.

I. Commodities, Currency, Wealth and Capital

A commodity is an object that has two values; a use value and an

exchange value, or an appropriately determined value. If I have, for

example, 20 kilos of coffee, I can either consume it for my own use, or

exchange it for 20 meters of canvas, or for a suit, or for 250 grams of

silver, if, instead of coffee, I need one of these three commodities.

The use value of a commodity is based on the actual qualities of the

commodity itself, is meant to equal such qualities based on its

qualities, and not any other needs. The use value of 20 kilos of coffee

is based on the qualities of the coffee; these qualities being such that

they make it clear to all that it is apt for us to drink, but they don’t

enable us to clothe ourselves, or give us material for a shirt. It is

for this reason that we are able to gain from the use value of 20 kilos

of coffee, only if we feel the desire to drink coffee; but if instead we

need a shirt, or to wear a suit that costs the use value of 20 kilos of

coffee, we don’t know what to do; or, to say it better, we wouldn’t know

what to do, if alongside the use value, there wasn’t, in the commodity,

the exchange value. We in fact find another who has a suit, but who

doesn’t need it, and needs coffee instead. Now one makes a trade right

away. We give him the 20 kilos of coffee and he gives us the suit.

But does it follow that the commodities, while they differ completely

between themselves because of their different qualities, that is for

their use values, can be exchanged one for the other? We have already

shown this.

Because, alongside the use value, there is also found an exchange value

in the commodity. Now, the foundation of the exchange value, or the

appropriately determined value, is the human labor needed for its

production. The commodity is made by the worker; human labor is the

life-force that gives it existence. All commodities therefore, although

they’re different in quality, are substantially the same, because

daughters of the same father all have the same blood in their veins. If

20 kilos of coffee are exchanged for a suit, or for 20 meters of canvas,

it is indeed because the same amount of human labor is needed to produce

20 kilos of coffee as is needed to produce a suit, or 20 meters of

canvas. Therefore, the value’s substance is human labor, and the size of

the value is determined from the amount of human labor itself. The

value’s substance is the same in all commodities; therefore it does not

stand that they must be equal in size, because the commodities are, like

expressions of value, all equal to one another, i.e., all able to be

exchanged one for the other.

The size of the value depends on the amount of work; in 12 hours of work

one produces a value double that which is produced in only six hours of

work. Therefore, someone would say, the more one works and the longer

one works, save for disability or for laziness, the more value is

produced. Nothing is falser. Labor, which forms the substance of value,

isn’t the work of a superhuman, but average labor, which is always the

same, and that is rightly called social labor. This is that work, which,

in a given center of production, can be averaged by a worker, who works

with an average ability and an average intensity.

The dual nature of commodities known, being, that is, use value and

exchange value, one will see that commodities can be born only by the

work of labor, and by labor that is useful to all. Air for example,

grasslands, virgin soil, etc. are useful to people, but don’t constitute

any value to them, because they aren’t the products of work and,

consequentially, aren’t commodities. We can make ourselves objects for

our own personal uses, but which can’t be useful for others; in such a

case we don’t produce commodities; even less we produce commodities when

we work on objects, which do not have any usefulness either for us or

for others.

Commodities, therefore, are exchanged for each other; the one, that is,

that presents itself as the other’s equivalent. For the greater comfort

of exchanges one begins to use always one given commodity as the

equivalent; that which so steps out from the rank of all the others, to

stand in front of them as a general equivalent; that is currency.

Currency therefore is that commodity which, by custom and by legal

sanction, has monopolized the position of the general equivalent. Thus

has happened for us with silver. While before 20 kilos of coffee, a

suit, 20 meters of canvas and 250 grams of silver were four commodities,

which were exchanged indistinctly for one another, today instead you

have that 20 kilos of coffee, 20 meters of canvas and a suit are three

commodities, which are worth 250 grams of silver, i.e. 50 lire.

However, whether the exchange is done immediately from commodity to

commodity, or the exchange is done by means of currency, the law of

exchange always remains the same. A commodity can never be exchanged

with another, if the labor that is needed to produce one is not equal to

the labor that is needed to produce the other. This law must be kept

well in mind, because above it is founded everything that we will

afterwards.

With the arrival of currency, immediate or direct exchanges, commodity

for commodity, end. Exchanges must all be done, from now on, through

currency; so that a commodity that wishes to transform into another,

must, first, from a commodity transform into currency, then from

currency transform itself again into a commodity. The formula of

exchanges, therefore, will not be a chain of commodities anymore, but a

chain of commodities and currency. See here:

Commodity–Currency–Commodity–Currency–Commodity–Currency.

Now, if in this formula we find indicated the turns that make the goods,

in their successive transformations, we find equally marked the turns of

currency. It is from this same formula therefore that we will derive the

formula of capital.

When we find ourselves in possession of a certain accumulation of

commodities, or of currency, which is the same thing, we are owners of a

certain wealth. If we are able to give a body to this wealth, that is an

organism able to develop itself, we will have capital. Giving it a body,

or an organism able to develop itself, means to be born and to grow; and

in fact the essence of capital is placed precisely in the possibly

prolific nature of currency.

The resolution of the problem (to find the way to give birth to capital)

is contained in the resolution of another problem: to find a way to make

money grow progressively.

In the formula, which marks the turns of commodities and of currency, we

add, to the term currency, a mark of progressive growth indicating it,

for example, with a number and we will have:

Currency–Commodities–Currency¹–Commodities–Currency²–Commodities–Currency³.

This is the formula of capital.

II. How Capital is Born

Carefully examining the formula of capital, it can be noted in the last

analysis that the matter of the accrual of capital is resolved in the

following way: finding a commodity that profits more than what it costs;

finding a commodity that, in our hands, can give rise to value, so that,

by selling it, we come to amass more money than we spent to buy it. In

short, it must be an elastic commodity that, stretched however much in

our hands, can grow in value. This very singular commodity indeed exists

and it is called labor power, or labor force.

For example, here is a money-owner, who possesses a large amount of

wealth, and wants to use his wealth to give rise to capital. He comes

into the marketplace solely in search of labor power. Let’s follow his

process. He walks around the marketplace, and meet a proletarian, who

came solely to sell their only commodity: labor power. The worker,

however, is not selling his labor power in whole, not completely, but

only partly, for a given time, ie for a day, for a week, for a month,

etc. If he sold it altogether, of course, he would become a commodity

himself; he would no longer be a wage-worker, but the slave of his

owner.

The price of labor power is calculated in the following way. One takes

the cost of food, daily life, rent, and however many other things are

needed every year by a worker to maintain their labor power, always in

their normal state; one adds, to this first amount, the amount needed

every year by a worker to procreate, raise, and educate, according to

their condition, their children; one divides the total by 365, the

number of days in a year, and one will have how much, every day, is

required to maintain labor power, one’s daily price, that is the daily

wages of the worker.

A part of this calculation is also that which is needed for the worker

to procreate, raise, and educate his children because these are the

future sources of labor power. If the proletarian sold all of his labor

power, instead of just a part, of course, he would become a commodity

himself, i.e. a slave of his owner, and his children would also be a

commodity, i.e. slaves, just like their parent, of their owner; but, by

taking only a part of the labor power of the proletarian away, he has

the right to keep the rest, which is found partially in himself and

partially in his children.

With this calculation we obtain the exact price of labor power. The law

of exchange, explained in the previous chapter, says that a commodity

cannot be exchanged with another if the labor that is needed to produce

the former is not equal to the labor that is needed to produce the

latter. Now, the labor that is needed to produce labor power is equal to

the labor needed to produce the things needed by the worker, and as a

consequence the value of those things necessary to the worker is equal

to the value of their labor power. Therefore if the worker needs 3 lire

every day for all of their necessities, it’s clear that 3 lire will be

the price of their labor power every day.

Now let’s suppose — a supposition never hurt anyone — that the daily

wages of a worker, found in the above manner, amount to 3 lire. Let’s

also suppose that, in 6 hours of work, one can produce 15 grams of

silver, which is equivalent to 3 lire. The money-owner has meanwhile

formed a contract with the proletarian, paying him for his labor power

at the correct price of 3 lire a day. He’s a perfectly honest and

religious member of the bourgeoisie, for whom it may look good to

defraud the worker’s wages. He will be able to make the point that the

salary is paid to the worker at the end of the day or the end of the

week, that is after he has already completed his labor; because this is

also how it’s done with other commodities, whose value is realized in

use, like, for example, the rent for a house, or a small farm, whose

price one is able to pay at the expiring of terms.

There are three elements of the labor process: firstly, labor power;

secondly, raw materials; and thirdly, the means of production. Our

money-owner, after the labor power, also bought raw materials at the

market, namely cotton wool; the means of production, namely the workshop

with all of its tools, is good and ready; and, consequently, he has

nothing left to do than to make the way clear between his legs for the

work to begin.

“[W]e 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” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch.

6).

Our characters arrive at the workshop, where the boss hurries to put his

worker to task, giving him 10 kilos of cotton wool, since he is a cotton

spinner.

Labor is made up of the utilization of the elements that compose it; the

utilization of labor power, raw materials, and means of production. The

utilization of the means of production is calculated in the following

way. From the sum of the value of all the means of production, the

building, radiators, coal, etc, one subtracts the sum of the value of

all of the raw materials that will remain of the means of production put

out by the consumption of use; one divides the result of this

subtraction by the number of days that the means of production can last,

and one will have the daily consumption of the means of production. Our

worker works a 12-hour day. When it’s over, he has transformed the 10

kilos of cotton wool into 10 kilos of thread, which he hands over to his

boss, and he leaves the workshop to shrink at home. Along the way,

however, for that ugly vice that workers have, to always want to reckon

behind the backs of their boss, he tries to find out in his mind how

much his boss will be able to earn off of those 10 kilos of thread.

“I don’t rightly know how much the thread costs,” he says to himself,

but the amount is soon figured out. “I saw cotton wool when he bought it

at the market at 3 lire per kilo. All of the means of production cost 4

lire per day. Therefore:

“10 kilos of cotton wool: ₤30

“Utilization of the means of production: ₤4

“Daily salary: ₤3

“Total: ₤37

“The 10 kilos of thread are worth 37 lire. Now on the cotton wool he

certainly didn’t gain anything, because he paid for it at the proper

price, neither a cent too much nor a cent too little; as for me, he pays

for my labor power 3 lire a day, the price that suits him; therefore it

must be the case that he profits by selling his thread for more than

it’s worth. It absolutely must be this way; otherwise he would be

spending 37 lire just to earn 37 lire, not counting the time that he

lost and the inconvenience that it took.

“Now look how the bosses do things! They have a good wish to make out

like honest people with the worker from whom they buy labor power, with

the merchant from whom they buy raw materials, but they have an eternal

flaw, and the rest of us workers, who know how the industry works, shall

go on strike. But to sell a commodity for more than it is worth is like

selling with false weights, which is illegal. Therefore, if the workers

were to expose their bosses’ tricks, they would be forced to close their

factories; and to produce goods based on need, maybe they would open

large government facilities; that would be much better.”

So the daydreaming worker arrived at home; and there, dined, went to

bed, and slept deeply, dreaming of the disappearance of bosses and the

creation of government workshops.

Sleep, poor friend, sleep in peace, while hope still rests within you.

Sleep in peace, for the disappointing day will soon come. Soon you will

learn how your boss can sell their goods for profit, without defrauding

anyone. He will make you see how one becomes a capitalist, and a large

capitalist, while remaining perfectly honest.

Now your dreams will never again be so peaceful. You will see capital in

your nights, like a nightmare, that presses you and threatens to crush

you. With terrified eyes you will see it get fatter, like a monster with

one hundred proboscises that feverishly search the pores of your body to

suck your blood. And finally you will learn to assume its boundless and

gigantic proportions, its appearance dark and terrible, with eyes and

mouth of fire, morphing its suckers into enormous hopeful trumpets,

within which you’ll see thousands of human beings disappear: men, women,

children. Down your face will trickle the sweat of death, because your

time, and that of your wife and your children will soon arrive. And your

final moan will be drowned out by the happy sneering of the monster,

glad with your state, so much richer, so much more inhumane.

Let’s return to our money-owner. This bourgeois, a model of accuracy and

of order, has adjusted all of his daily counts; and here is how he has

figured the price of his 10 kilos of thread:

For 10 kilos of cotton wool at 3 lire per kilo – ₤30

For the utilization of the means of production – ₤4

But around the third element, fitting into the production of his

commodity, he has not noted the salary paid to the worker. He knows very

well that a large difference occurs between the price of labor and the

product of labor power. A daily salary represents how much is needed to

sustain the worker for 24 hours, but it doesn’t by any means represent

what the worker produces in one day of work.

Our money-owner knows very well that the 3 lire of salary he paid paid

represent the upkeep for 24 hours for his worker, but not that which he

produced in the 12 hours that he worked in his factory. He knows all of

this, precisely as a farmer knows the difference that occurs between

what it costs to maintain a cow in a stable, to feed it, etc, and what

is produced in milk, cheese, butter, etc. Labor power has the singular

quality to give something more worth than it cost and it is for this

exactly this fact that the money-owner went to purchase it in the

marketplace.

The worker has nothing to smile about. He took the fair price for his

good; the law of exchanges was observed perfectly; and he doesn’t have

the right to tell the buyer what to do with the commodity, like how a

grocer can’t tell their patron how to use the sugar and pepper bought in

their shop.

We have supposed above that, in 6 hours of work, 15 grams of silver are

produced, equivalent to 3 lire. Therefore, if in 6 hours the labor power

produces a value of 3 lire, in 12 hours it will produce a value of 6

lire. Here therefore is the calculation, which states the value of 10

kilos of thread:

10 kilos of cotton wool at 3 lire per kilo: ₤30

Use of the means of production: ₤4

12 hours of labor power: ₤6

Total: ₤40

The money-owner has therefore spent 37 lire and has obtained a commodity

that is worth 40 lire; so he gained 3 lire; his money has increased.

The problem is unraveled. Capital is born.

III. The Workday

Capital, just born, feels quickly the need for nourishment to develop

itself; and the capitalist, who lives now but for the life of the

capital, attentively worries about the needs of this being, which has

become his heart and soul, and he finds a way to satisfy himself.

The first method, employed by the capitalist in favor of his capital, is

the extension of the workday. It’s certain that the workday has its

limits. Foremost, a day only consists of 24 hours; it is then necessary

from these 24 hours to cut a certain number, because the worker must

satisfy all his physical and moral needs: to sleep, feed himself, rest

his strength, etc.

“But both these limiting 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?

“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.

“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.

“If the labourer consumes his disposable time for himself, he robs the

capitalist.

“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.’

“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 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” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 10, sec. 1).

We will now see exposed how force acts, as told by the facts, when all

is made by and for capital. The facts cited in this book are all taken

from England: primarily, because this is the country where capitalist

production has reached the greatest development, towards which the rest

of all civilized countries tend; and, in the second place, because only

in England is there a suitable amount of documents, regarding the

conditions of work, collected by regular government commissions. The

modest limits of this summary, however, only allow for a reproduction of

a small part of the rich materials collected in the work of Marx.

“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. “’ 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 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…’

“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…’

“Half the workers [in matchstick factories] 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.’

“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…’

“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, 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. 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 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” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 10, sec. 3).

This is how capital whips labor, which, after much suffering, searches

until the end to resist it. The workers unite and demand, to the powers

that be, the establishment of a normal workday. One may easily

comprehend how much of this they are able to obtain, considering that

the law must be made and upheld by the capitalists themselves, against

whom the workers would like to contend.

IV. Relative Surplus Value

Labor power, producing a greater value than how much something is worth,

that is a “surplus,” has created capital; enlarging then this surplus

value with prolongation of the workday, has given sufficient nourishment

to the capital for its infancy. The capital grows, and the surplus value

must increase to satisfy the grown need. Increase of surplus value,

however, does not mean, like we saw before, the extension of the

workday, which eventually also has its necessary limits, although it is

a very elastic length. For what little time there is that the capitalist

leaves to the worker for the satisfaction of his most basic needs, the

workday will always be less than 24 hours. The workday meets then a

natural limit, and the surplus value, consequently, an insurmountable

obstacle. Let’s represent the workday with the line A–B.

A-------D-------C----------------B

The letter A here represents the beginning and B the end, that natural

limit, that is, past which it isn’t possible to go. A-C is the part of

the day in which the worker produces the value of the salary received

and C-B the part of the day in which the worker produces surplus value.

We see that our cotton spinner, in fact, receiving 3 lire in salary, was

reproducing the value of his salary with half of his day, and was

producing 3 lire of surplus value with the other. The work done from

A-C, with which the salary’s value is produced, is necessary labor,

while the work done from C-B, which produces surplus value, is called

exploitation.

The capitalist is thirsty for exploitation, because it is this that

creates surplus value. Prolonged exploitation prolongs the workday,

which finishes at its natural limit B, which represents an

insurmountable obstacle to exploitation and surplus value. What to do

now? The capitalist soon finds the solution. He observes that

exploitation has two limits, one B, the end of the workday, the other C,

the end of the necessary work; if the limit B is fixed, it won’t be so

for limit C. Being able to move the point C all the way to point D, one

would grow the exploitation from C-B the length of D-C, exactly how much

the necessary work from A-C would decrease. Surplus value would thus

find a way to continue growing, not in the absolute way like at first,

which is by always prolonging the workday, but in relation to the growth

of exploitation with the corresponding decrease in necessary work. The

first was absolute surplus value, this is relative surplus value.

Relative surplus value is founded upon the decreasing of necessary work;

the decreasing of necessary work is founded upon the decreasing of

wages; the decreasing of wages is founded upon a decrease in prices of

things that are necessary for the worker; therefore relative surplus

value is founded on the depreciation of the commodities that the worker

uses.

And there would be an even quicker way of producing relative surplus

value, someone will say, and that would be to pay the worker a salary

less than that which he is due, that is not to pay him the proper price

of his commodity, labor power. We cannot consider this expedient, used

often in fact, minimally, because we aren’t admitting that it’s the most

perfect observance of the law of exchange, according to which all

commodities, and consequently labor power as well, must be sold and

bought at their proper value.

Our capitalist, like we already saw, is an absolutely honest bourgeois;

he will never use, to enlarge his capital, a method that is not entirely

worthy of him.

Let’s suppose that, in a workday, a worker produces 6 items of a

commodity, that the capitalist sells for the price of ₤7,50, because in

the value of this commodity the raw materials and the means of

production come to ₤1,50 and 12 hours of labor power come to 6 lire: all

three components, therefore, come to ₤7,50. The capitalist finds a

surplus value of 3 lire on the value of ₤7,50, the cost of his

commodity, and on top of every component a surplus value of ₤0,50,

because he spends ₤0,75 and extracts ₤1,25 from each of these. Let’s

suppose that with a new system of work, or just with perfection of the

old way, production doubles, and that, instead of 6 items a day, the

capitalist is able to attain 12. If in 6 items the raw materials and the

means of production come to ₤1,50, in 12 he will come to 3 lire, that is

every item comes to ₤0,25. Those 3 lire combined with the 6 lire

produced by labor power in 12 hours, make 9 lire, that is how much the

12 items cost, each one of which therefore comes to the price of ₤0,75.

Now the capitalist needs to make himself a larger place in the market to

sell a double quantity of his commodity; and you can do this by somewhat

restricting the price. In other words, the capitalist needs to make a

reason arise for which he is able to sell their items on the market in

twice the number as before; and the reason is found exactly in price

reduction. He will sell, therefore, his items at a price somewhat lower

than ₤1,25, which was his price before, but greater than ₤0,75 (how much

each one of these is truly worth). He with sell them at a lira each, and

so he will have secured doubled sales of his items, from which he now

gains 6 lire; 3 lire of surplus value and 3 lire of difference between

their value and the price at which they are sold.

As you can see, the capitalist gains a great profit from this growth of

production. All capitalists are therefore highly interested in

increasing the products of their industries, and it is with this that

they are able to make this happen every day in any kind of production.

Their extraordinary gain, however, that which represents the difference

between the value of the commodity and the price at which it is sold,

doesn’t last long, because right away the new or perfected system of

production becomes adopted by all out of necessity. So now as a result

the value of the commodity lessens by half. At first every item was

worth ₤1,25; now instead it’s worth 62 ½ cents. The capitalist however

always attains a profit, having doubled production. At first 3 lire of

surplus value for 6 items and now 3 lire of surplus value for 12 items;

but given that the 12 items are produced in the same time the 6 items

were made, that is in 12 hours of work, he always has as a final result

3 lire of surplus value for one 12-hour workday, but double the

production.

When this increase in production is regarding goods necessary to the

worker, it consequently carries the lowering of the price of labor

power, and therefore the lessening of necessary work and the increase of

exploitation, which makes up relative surplus value.

V. Cooperation

It’s been a bit since we haven’t dealt with the facts of our capitalist,

who must have certainly prospered in the meantime. Let’s go back to his

workshop, where we may have the pleasure of seeing our friend, the

spinner, again. Here we are. Let’s enter.

Oh, surprise! There’s no longer one worker, but now a large number of

workers find themselves at work. All quiet and in order as if they were

many soldiers. The lack of guards and inspectors is seen as supervisors

who walk among the ranks, all observing, giving orders, or overseeing

the the execution is by the books. Of the capitalist nothing is seen,

not even a shadow. A glass door opens inside, maybe it will be him;

let’s see. It’s a solemn person, but it’s not our capitalist. The

supervisors carefully stand around him, and they receive his orders with

the utmost attention. The sound of an electric doorbell is heard; one of

the supervisors runs to put his ear to the mouth of a metal tube, which

descends from the doorway along the wall; and and he soon comes to

announce to the director that the boss demands a conference with him.

Let’s look in the crowd of workers for our old acquaintance the spinner;

and finally we come to find him in a corner, completely devoted to work.

He’s become gaunt and pale in the face: on his face one reads a profound

thought of sadness. One day we saw him at the market negotiating his

labor power peer to peer with the money-owner; but how great the

distance between them has grown today! Today he is a worker lost in the

crowd of the many that populate the workshop, and oppressed by an

extraordinarily long workday; while the money-owner, who’s already

become a big capitalist, stands like a god atop Mount Olympus, from

where he sends orders to his people through a group of intermediaries.

Whatsoever has happened? It’s a piece of cake. The capitalist has

prospered. Capital has grown by a lot, and, in order to satisfy his new

needs, the capitalist has established cooperative labor, that is labor

done with a joining of forces. In this workshop, where at another time

only one labor force used to work, today there works a whole cooperation

of labor forces. Capital has gone out of its infancy, and presents

itself for the first time with its true appearance. The advantages that

capital finds in cooperation can be reduced to four. Firstly it’s in

cooperation that capital realizes true social labor power. Social labor

power being, as we already said, the average taken in a given center of

production among a number of workers who labor with an average degree of

ability and intensity, it’s clear that every single labor force will

move itself more or less from average or social force, which it

therefore can only obtain by gathering a great number of labor forces in

the same workshop; i.e. in cooperation.

The second advantage is the economics of the means of production. The

same workshop, the same heaters, etc., that used to serve only one, now

serve many workers.

The third advantage of cooperation is the growth of labor power.

“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” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 13).

The fourth advantage is the possibility to combine forces that are able

to execute tasks in a way that either wouldn’t be able to be

accomplished with isolated efforts, or would be able to be accomplished

in a very flawed fashion. Who hasn’t seen how 50 workers can move

enormous loads in one hour, while one labor force wouldn’t be able to

move them, in 50 hours altogether, even one inch? Who hasn’t seen how 12

workers, placed along the scaffolding of a house under construction, go

through a quantity of materials in one hour immensely greater than that

which one worker would go through in 12 hours? Who doesn’t understand

how 20 bricklayers can do much more work in one day than only one can do

in 20 days?

“Co-operation ever constitutes the fundamental form of the capitalist

mode of production” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 13).

VI. Division of Labor and Manufacturing

When the Capitalist gathers the workers to perform the various tasks,

which make up all of the labor for a commodity, in his workshop, he

gives an entirely special nature to simple cooperation; he establishes

the division of labor and manufacturing; which is none other than “a

productive mechanism whose parts are human beings” (Marx, Capital, vol.

1, ch. 14, sec. 1).

Although manufacturing is always based on the division of labor, it also

has a double origin. In fact in some cases manufacturing has brought

together the different processing needs for the completion of a

commodity in the same workshop, which first, like so many special

trades, used to be distinct and divided up; in other cases it has

divided, while keeping them in the same workshop, the different work

operations, that before used to make up a whole of the completion of a

commodity.

“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”

(Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 14, sec. 1).

The production of a pin was divided into more than twenty partial

processes, which form the parts of the complete manufacture of a pin.

Manufacturing, therefore, sometimes brings many trades together into

only one, and sometimes divides a trade into many more.

Manufacturing multiplies the forces and instruments of labor, but

renders them predominantly technical and simple, constantly applying

them to one sole and unique basic operation.

Great are the advantages that capital realizes in manufacturing,

allocating different labor forces to the same basic operations

constantly. Labor power gains very much in intensity and precision. All

of those little intervals, which one finds like pores between the

different phases of production of a good created by only one individual,

disappear when this individual always executes the same operation. The

worker needs no more than an hour to learn all about a trade albeit a

simple one, a unique operation of the trade itself, which he learns in

much less time and with less expense than how much was needed to learn a

trade in its entirety. This diminishing of expense and time is a

diminishing of things needed for the worker, i.e. a diminishing of

necessary labor, and a corresponding growth of overwork and surplus

value. The capitalist, really a parasite, always grows fatter at the

expense of labor, and the worker suffers greatly.

“While simple co-operation leaves the mode of working by the individual

for the most part unchanged, manufacture thoroughly 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, and the absurd fable of Menenius Agrippa, which

makes man a mere fragment of his own body, becomes realised” (Marx,

Capital, vol. 1, ch. 14, sec. 5).

“Dugald Stewart calls manufacturing labourers ‘living automatons ...

employed in the details of the work’” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 14,

fn. 40).

“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. 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”

(Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 14, sec. 5).

Heinrich von Storch says: “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”

(Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 14, fn. 42).

“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. 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” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 14, sec. 5).

“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’ (Adam Ferguson).

“As a matter of fact, some few manufacturers in the middle of the

18^(th) century preferred, for certain operations that were trade

secrets, to employ half-idiotic persons.

“‘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 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.’

“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 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?’” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 14, sec. 5).

Ferguson says: “And thinking itself, in this age of separations, may

become a peculiar craft” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 14, fn. 48).

“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 life,

it is the first to afford the materials for, and to give a start to,

industrial pathology” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 14, sec. 5).

“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 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” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 14, fn 50).

David Urquhart says: “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.” (Marx, Capital,

vol. 1, ch. 14, sec. 5).

“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’” (Marx,

Capital, vol. 1, ch. 14, fn. 51).

“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 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” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 14, sec. 5).

VII. Machinery and Modern Industry

John Stuart Mill, in his Principles of Political Economy, says:

“Hitherto [1848] it is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet

made have lightened the day’s toil of any human being” (Mill, Principles

of Political Economy, ch. 6).[2] This was not their purpose. Like every

other development of the productive force of labor, capitalist use of

machinery does not tend to lower the price of commodities, to shorten

the part of the day, in which the worker labors for himself, in relation

to lengthening the other, in which he works only for the capitalist. It

is a particular method for making relative surplus value.

But who is it that ever thinks of the worker? If the capitalist looks

after him, it is only to study a better way of exploiting him. The

worker sells his labor power, and the capitalist buys it, as the only

commodity that, with its surplus value, can enable him to give birth to

and grow capital. The capitalist, therefore, is only concerned with

making more surplus value. After having exhausted the resources of

absolute surplus value, he found relative surplus value. He now sees

that with machinery one can obtain in the same time a product two times,

four times, ten times, etc. bigger than before; and he begins to use

machinery. Cooperation, manufacturing, thus transform into modern

industry and his workshop into a factory. That capitalist, after having

mutilated and crippled the worker with the division of labor, after

having limited him to only one partial task, makes us watch a sadder

show yet. He rips from the hands of the worker that special tool, which

still reminds him of his art, his old status of a whole man, and

entrusts him to the machine. From now on the capitalist has no more need

for the worker, as he does a servant of his machinery. With the

introduction of machinery, the capitalist realizes an enormous profit at

first, one easily understands how, remembering how much we said about

relative surplus value. However with the propagation of the mechanical

system of production, the extraordinary profit ceases, and only the

growth of production remains that, made general by the generalization of

machinery, begins to lower the value of the things necessary to the

worker, the necessary labor time, and salaries, and to increase overwork

and surplus value.

Capital is divided into constant and variable. Constant capital is that

which is represented by raw materials and the means of production. The

building, the heaters, the tools, the auxiliary materials, like tallow,

coal, oil, etc., the means of production, like iron, cotton, silk,

silver, wood, etc., are all things that make up parts of constant

capital.

Variable capital is that which is represented by salary, by the price

that is of labor power. The first is called constant, because its value

remains constant in the value of the commodity, of which it is a

portion; while the second is called variable, exactly because its value

grows coming in to make a portion of the value of the commodity. It is

only variable capital that creates surplus value; and the machine only

makes up a portion of constant capital.

The capitalist aims, in modern industry, to profit from an enormous mass

of past labor, in the same way that he would profit from a mass of

natural forces, ie for free. To be able to reach his goal, however, he

needs to have a complete mechanism, which will be composed of more or

less expensive materials, and will always absorb a certain amount of

work. He certainly does not have to buy steam power, or the driving

property of water or of air; he certainly does not have to buy

mechanical breakthroughs and applications; nor the inventions and

improvements of the tools of a trade. He can avail himself of all of

this, always as he wishes, without expense; but he just needs to procure

all of a mechanism adapted to this. The machine enters therefore, as a

means of production, making up a portion of constant capital; and the

proportion, in which it comes in to compose the value of the commodity,

is in direct proportion with its consumption and with its auxiliary

materials, coal, tallow, etc., and in inverse proportion with the value

of the commodity. That is to say that the more one wears out a machine

with its auxiliary materials in producing a commodity, the more it tells

them of its value; while the value of the commodity is larger, for which

the machine works, the portion of value that comes from the consumption

of the machine is smaller.

“Since [the steam-hammer’s] 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” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 15, sec. 2).

When, for the generalization of the system of modern industry, the

machine ceases to be a direct source of extraordinary wealth for the

capitalist, he succeeds in finding many other ways, with which he can

continue to get very large amounts of relative surplus value from this

new way of production.

“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.

“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, 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” (Marx, Capital, vol.

1, ch. 15, sec. 3A).

“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 …

“In the first place, in the form of machinery, the implements of labour

become automatic, things moving and working independent of the workman.

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. 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 …

“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.

“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” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 15, sec. 3B).

To repair this damage, the capitalist feels the need to make the machine

work as much as possible, and most importantly begins to prolong daily

labor, introducing night shifts and the relays system. As the word

itself indicates, used to indicate the changing of postal horses, the

relays system consists of making two teams of workers carry out labor,

that switch off every twelve hours, or three that switch off every eight

hours; in a way that labor always proceeds without the slightest

interruption for all 24 hours. This system, so advantageous for capital,

is also begun to be used in the first moment of the appearance of

machinery, when the capitalist is in a great rush to be able to amass

the greatest quantity possible of extraordinary profit, that soon must

stop for the generalization of the machinery itself. The capitalist,

therefore, breaks down all obstacles of time with the machinery, all of

the limits of the day that were imposed on labor in manufacturing. And

when he is joined with the natural limit of the day, to absorb that is

all of the 24 hours of the day, he finds the way to make of only one day

two, three, four or more days, intensifying labor two, three, four or

more times. In fact, if in one workday one finds a way of making a

worker carry out two times, three times, four times, etc. more labor

than before, it’s clear that the old workday will correspond to two,

three, four or more workdays. And the capitalist finds the way to do

this, rendering, as we have already said, labor more intense, squeezing,

in other words, into only one day the labor of two, three, four or more

days. It is with machinery that he is able to achieve this goal.

“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.

“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.’

“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’” (Marx, Capital,

vol. 1, ch. 15, sec. 3C).

“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 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. 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. 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. With

regard to the work of the mere attendants, it can, to some extent, be

replaced in the mill by machines, 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. 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’ (Friedrich Engels).

“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 and intellectual

activity. 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’ (‘The Master

Spinners’ and Manufacturers’ Defence Fund. Report of the Committee’,

1854).

“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’ (Andrew

Ure). 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” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch.

15, sec. 4).

“‘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’

(Friedrich Engels). 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 4^(th) 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” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1,

ch. 15, fn. 108).

“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. 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 17^(th) 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 this town,” says Boxhorn (Inst. Pol., 1663), referring to the

introduction of this machine into Leyden, “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 15^(th)

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 19^(th) 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 9^(th) 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 18^(th) 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.

“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 18^(th) 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”

(Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 1, sec. 5).

Here, therefore, are the results of machinery and modern industry for

the workers. These are, foremost, driven in large part by factories, in

which the machine has taken its place. The few people who remain must

suffer the humiliation of seeing the last instrument of labor snatched

from their hand and being reduced to the condition of servants of

machinery; they must bear the burden of an extraordinarily grown

workday; the must renounce their wives and children, having become the

slaves of capital; and they must suffer, finally, the indescribable

spasms, products of the torture of labor progressively intensified by

the mad lust, by which the capitalist is taken in the period of modern

industry, for surplus value. But the theologians of the god of capital

aren’t lacking, who explain all, and justify all with their eternal

laws. To the desperate cry of the workers hungered by machinery, they

respond with the announcement of a farfetched law of compensation.

“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.

“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. 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 (It’s lawful to hide evil with words)” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch.

15, sec. 6).

VIII. Salary

The supporters of the capitalist mode of production pretend that salary

is payment for labor, and surplus value the product of capital.

But what is labor value? Labor, either still in the worker, or already

out; that is to say, labor, either the force, the power to do something,

or the thing itself already done: in short, labor, either labor power,

or the commodity. The worker cannot sell labor that’s already left him,

ie the thing he produces, the commodity, because this belongs to the

capitalist, and not to him. Because the worker could sell labor that’s

already left him, ie the commodity he produced, he would need to possess

the means of production and raw materials, and so he would be the

merchant of the commodities he produced. But he doesn’t possess

anything, he is a proletarian, who, to live, must sell to others the

only good that rests in him, that is his power or force to work, labor

power. The capitalist therefore can buy nothing besides labor power;

which, like all other commodities, has a use value and an exchange

value. The capitalist pays the appropriately determined value, i.e. the

exchange value, to the worker for the commodity, which he sells. But

labor power also has a use value, which belongs to the capitalist who

bought it. Now, the use value of this singular commodity has a double

quality. The first is that which it has in common with the use value of

all other commodities, that is, of satisfying a need; the second is

that, completely special to it, of creating value, which distinguishes

this commodity from all the others.

Therefore, salary cannot represent the price of labor power. And surplus

value cannot be produced by capital, because capital is inert matter,

which is always found to have the same amount of value as it did when it

was used in the commodity; it is matter that hasn’t any life, and that,

remaining by itself, without labor power, would never be able to have

it. It is only labor power that is able to produce surplus value. It is

this that gives the first seed of life to capital. It is this that

supports the whole life of capital. This, more than anything, first

sucks, then absorbs with all of its pores, and finally vigorously pumps

surplus value from labor.

The two main forms of salary are: time-wages and piece-wages.

Time-wages are those paid for a given time; like for a day, for a week,

for a month, etc, of labor. It is simply a transformation of the price

of labor power. Instead of saying that the worker has sold his labor

power of one day for 3 lire, one says that the worker goes to work for a

salary of 3 lire a day.

The salary of 3 lire per day is therefore the price of labor power for a

day. But this day can be more or less long. If, for example, a day of 10

hours of labor power is paid 30 cents per hour, then, if it’s 12 hours,

labor power is paid 25 cents per hour. Therefore, the capitalist,

extending the workday, pays the worker a smaller price for his labor

power. The capitalist can also increase salary, while continuing to pay

the worker, for his labor power, the same price as before, and even

less. If a capitalist increases his worker’s salary from 3 lire to ₤3,60

a day, and at the same time he prolongs the workday from the 10 hours

that it was before to 12 hours, he, by increasing daily wages by ₤0,60,

will always come out paying the worker ₤0,30 an hour for his labor

power. If then the capitalist increases the salary from ₤3 to ₤3,60,

but, at the same time, prolongs the day from 10 to 15 hours, he, by

increasing the daily wages, will be able to pay the worker less than

before for his labor power, ie 24 cents instead of 30 cents an hour. The

capitalist obtains the same effect, if, instead of increasing the length

of labor, he increases it in volume; as we have already seen he was able

to do with machinery. In conclusion, the capitalist, increasing labor,

is able to cheat the worker honestly; and he can do it while gaining

fame for his generosity, with the increase of his daily wages.

When the capitalist pays the worker by the hour, he still finds means of

damaging him, increasing or decreasing labor, but always honestly paying

the same price for every hour of labor. Indeed, the salary is 25 cents

for an hour of labor. If the capitalist makes the worker labor for 8

hours, instead of 12, he will pay him ₤2, instead of ₤3; he will be

losing, that is, one lira, with which the worker must satisfy the third

part of his daily needs. Inversely, if the capitalist makes the worker

labor for 14 or 16 hours, instead of 12, while paying him ₤3,50 or ₤4

instead of ₤3, he ends up taking 2 or 4 hours of labor from the worker

at a smaller price than it’s worth. After 12 hours of labor the worker’s

powers have already suffered consumption; and the other 2 or 4 hours of

labor, overtime, cost more than the first 12 hours. This rationale,

presented by the workers, in fact seems to be accepted by different

industries, where they pay a greater price for overtime done after the

established hours of the workday.

The smaller the price of labor power, represented by time-wages, the

longer the labor time. And that is clear. If the salary is ₤0,25 per

hour, instead of ₤0,30, the worker must work a 12-hour day, instead of

working a 10-hour day, to procure the ₤3 required for their daily needs.

If the salary is ₤2 a day, the worker must work three days, instead of

two, to procure how much he needs for only two days. Here the lessening

of salary increases labor; but it also happens that the increase of

labor makes salary lower. With the introduction of machinery, for

example, a worker comes to produce double than before; so the capitalist

lessens the number of workers; as a consequence the request for work

grows, and salaries fall.

Piece-wages are nothing but a transformation of time-wages; as shown by

the fact that these two forms of salary are used indifferently, not only

in different industries, but at times even in the same industry.

A worker labors 12 hours a day for a salary of ₤3 and produces a value

of ₤6. Here it is irrelevant to say that the worker produces, in the

first 6 hours of his labor, the ₤3 of his salary, and, in the other 6

hours, the ₤3 of surplus value; it’s equivalent to saying that the

worker produces, in every first half-hour, ₤0,25, a twelfth of his

salary, and, in every second half-hour, ₤0,25, a twelfth of the surplus

value. In the same way, if the worker produces, in 12 hours of work, 24

items, and receives 12,5 cents per item, in total ₤3, it’s exactly like

saying that the worker produces 12 items to reproduce the ₤3 given to

him in payment, and 12 items to produce ₤3 of surplus value; or that the

worker produces, in every hour of work, and item for his payment, and an

item for his boss’s gain.

In 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.

“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. 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.

“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. It is moreover now the personal interest of the labourer to

lengthen the working-day, since with it his daily or weekly wages rise.

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” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 21).

Piece-wages are one of two principle supports of the above-mentioned

system, that is of paying the worker by the hour, without the boss’s

commitment to occupy the worker regularly during the day or the week.

“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” (Marx, Capital, vol.1, ch. 21).

The increase in production is followed by the proportional decrease in

salary. When the worker was producing 12 items in 12 hours, the

capitalist used to pay him, for example, a salary of ₤0,25 per item.

With the production doubled, the worker produces 24 items, instead of

12, and the capitalist lowers wages by half, i.e., to 12,5 cents per

item.

“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 capitalist rightly knocks on the head such pretensions as gross

errors as to the nature of wage-labour. 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” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 21).

IX. The Accumulation of Capital

If we observe the formula of capital, we easily comprehend that its

conservation is placed completely in its successive and continuous

reproduction.

In fact, capital is divided, as we already know, in two: into constant,

that is, and variable. Constant capital, represented by the means of

production and raw materials, is worn away continuously during the

process of labor. Tools are used, machinery used, carbon, tallow, etc.,

that is needed by the machinery, and finally the building is used. At

the same time, however, that the labor is able in such a way to wear

away constant capital, it is also reproduced in the same proportions in

which it uses it. Constant capital finds itself reproduced in the

commodity in the proportions in which it was used during its production.

The value used of the means of production and the raw materials is

always reproduced exactly in the value of the commodity, as we have

already seen elsewhere. If, therefore, constant capital comes to be

partially reproduced in every commodity, it’s clear that, in the value

of a certain number of manufactured commodities, one will find all of

the constant capital, used in their production.

As it is with constant capital, so too with variable capital. Variable

capital, that represented by the value of labor power, i.e. by salary,

is also reproduced exactly in the value of the commodity. We have

already seen it. The worker, in the first part of his labor, produces

his salary, and in the second the surplus value. As the worker is not

paid salary for that finished work, so it arises that he collects his

salary after having already reproduced the equivalent in the commodity

of the capitalist.

The assembly of salaries paid to workers is therefore from these

endlessly reproduced. This endless reproduction behind salaries

perpetuates the subjection of the worker to the capitalist. When the

proletarian comes to the market to sell his labor power, he comes to

take the position assigned to him by the capitalist mode of production,

and to contribute to the social production through his share of the

labor, withdrawing, for his maintenance, that part behind salaries, that

he will have to, first, reproduce with his labor.

It is always the eternal bond of human subjection, either under the form

of slavery, serfdom, or wage-worker.

The superficial observer believes that the slave labors for nothing. And

he doesn’t think that the slave must above all make up to his owner how

much was spent for his maintenance: and he observes that the maintenance

of the slave is at times a great deal better than that of the

wage-worker, his owner being highly interested in his conservation, like

the conservation of a part of his own capital. The serf, who belongs to

his lord, together with the land, to which he is bound, is, for the

superficial observer, a being who has made progress compared to the

slave, because he sees clearly that the serf gives only one part of his

labor to his lord, while he employs the other part on the little land

assigned to him, to live life. And being a wage-worker, in turn, appears

to the superficial observer, a state much further progressed compared to

slavery, because the worker seems perfectly free in it, collecting the

value of his own labor.

What a strange illusion! If the worker could realize for himself the

value of his own labor, the capitalist mode of production would not be

able to exist any longer. We have already seen it. The worker is only

able to obtain the value of his labor power, which is the only thing

that he can sell, because it is the only good that he possesses in the

world. The product of labor belongs to the capitalist, who pays salary

to the proletarian, i.e. his maintenance. In the same way, the piece of

land left by the lord to his serf, as well as the time and tools

necessary to work it, are the sum of the means that he has to live,

while he must labor for his lord the rest of the time.

The slave, serf and worker all labor in part to produce their

maintenance, and in part completely for the benefit of their patrons.

These represent three different forms of the very same bond of human

subjection and exploitation. It is always the subjection of the man

without any primitive accumulation (that is of means of production,

which are the means of life) to the the man who possesses a primitive

accumulation, the means of production, the sources of life.

Conservation, i.e. the reproduction of capital, is just, in the

capitalist mode of production, the conservation of this bond of human

subjection and exploitation.

Labor does not only reproduce capital, it also produces surplus value,

which forms that which is called “revenue of capital”. If the capitalist

blends every year all or part of his revenue with capital, we will have

an accumulation of capital, which will grow progressively. With simple

reproduction labor conserves capital; with accumulation of surplus value

labor increases capital.

When one re-incorporates the revenue with capital, one comes to use this

revenue, partially in the means of production, partially in raw

materials and partially in labor power. Now you have that the past

overwork, past unpaid labor, increases the whole capital. One part of

last year’s unpaid labor pays this year’s necessary work. Here is what

the capitalist is able to do, thanks to the ingenious mechanism of

modern production.

Once the system of modern production is admitted, all based upon private

property and the wage-worker, nothing can be said about the consequences

that derive from it, one of which is capitalist accumulation. Is it

important to the worker Antonio if the 3 lire that are paid to him as

salary represent the worker Peter’s unpaid labor? What he has a right to

know is if the 3 lire are the right price of his labor power, i.e. if

they are the exact equivalent of the things necessary to him in a day,

if the law of exchange, in a word, was observed rigorously.

When the capitalist begins to accumulate capital upon capital, a new

virtue, all rightly his, develops in him; the so-called “virtue of

abstinence”, which consists of limiting all of his own expenses, to use

the greater part of his revenue on 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” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 24, sec. 3).

“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 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’” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch.

24, fn. 20).

Capitalist accumulation requires an increase of hands. The number of

workers must be increased, if one wishes to convert a part of the

revenue into variable capital. The same organism of capitalist

reproduction performs in a way that the worker is able to conserve his

labor power in the new generation, from which capital takes labor power

in order to continue its endless process of reproduction. But the labor

that is required today by capital is higher that that which was required

yesterday; and consequently its price would naturally have to increase.

And in fact wages would have to increase, if in the same accumulation of

capital there were not a reason to make them decrease instead.

It’s true that revenue would have to be converted, partially into

constant capital, and partially into variable capital; partially, that

is, into the means of production and raw materials, and partially into

labor power, but it must be considered that with the accumulation of

capital come perfections of the old systems of production, new systems

of production and machinery; all things that make production grow, and

lessen the price of labor power, like we already know. To the extent

that the accumulation of capital grows, its variable part shrinks, while

its constant part increases. That is, the buildings, the machinery with

its auxiliary materials increase, the raw materials increase, but, at

the same time and in proportion to this increase, with the the

accumulation of capital the need for labor power decreases, the need of

hands. Decreasing the need of labor power diminishes the demand for it

and finally it also lowers its price. One has, therefore, that the more

the accumulation of capital progresses, the more the wages go down.

The accumulation of capital takes vast amounts of competition and

credit. Credit spontaneously brings more capital to merge together, or

to merge together with one stronger than any of the others. Competition,

instead, is the war that all of the capitalists wage between themselves;

it is there struggle for existence, from which emerge those who, to win,

had to already be the stronger ones before, rendered even stronger.

The accumulation of capital, therefore, makes a great number of hands

useless; it creates, that is, a surplus laboring population. “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” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1,

ch. 25, sec. 3).

This industrial reserve army, this surplus laboring population is

divided into different categories. The first of these is better-paid,

and is less short of work than the others, while doing a less painful

job. The last category instead is composed of workers, who find

themselves occupied more rarely than all the others, and always by a

more tiresome and vile job, which pays them at the lowest price that one

can ever pay human labor. This last category is the most numerous, not

only for the great contingent that industrial progress consigns year by

year, but above all because it is composed of the most prolific amount

of people, as the same fact demonstrates. “‘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.)”

(Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 25, fn. 24).

After these categories none remains besides “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, 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. 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

18^(th) century, regards the antagonism of capitalist production as a

general natural law of social wealth.

“‘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.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.’ 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.’

“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 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.’

“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’” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 25, sec. 4).

We now come to see, in the facts, what the effect of the accumulation of

capital are. Here, as elsewhere, our examples are all taken from

England, the preeminent country of the accumulation of capital, towards

which (let’s repeat it, and never forget it) all modern nations tend. I

regret that I’m only able to reproduce only a small part of the rich

material gathered by Marx.

“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 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.’

“Among the agricultural labourers, those of England, the wealthiest part

of the United Kingdom, were the worst fed. 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.’

“(‘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’) …

“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 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 …”

“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.

“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’” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 25, sec. 5B).

“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. 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. 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 23^(rd) 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 9^(th) 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 occupied; that in one family five

children died from small-pox and fever; that from the 1^(st) April to

the 1^(st) 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’” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch.

25, sec. 5C).

Let’s now see the effects of the crises on the better-paid part of the

working class. Here much is told by a correspondent of a newspaper, the

Morning Star, who, in January 1867, on the occasion of an industrial

crisis, visited the main localities in 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 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’ …

“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 …

“‘Calculated at this rate, the resources of the family would amount, at

the maximum, to 1,068 francs a-year …’

“According to this the budget of the family is:

“The annual expenditure of the family would cause a deficit upon the

hypothesis that the labourer has the food of:

“‘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,’ 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’” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 25, sec. 5E).

A report on Public Health, from 1865, speaks of a visit made in a time

of epidemic to houses of farmers, citing among others the following :

“‘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’” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 25, sec.

5E).

The modest size of this summary does not permit me to report here, from

the text, the minute aspects of the horrible state in which the farmers

of England lie.

Let’s close, therefore, this chapter, speaking of a completely special

plight, produced in England, among agricultural workers, by the

accumulation of capital.

The surplus agricultural population produces the effect of making wages

sink, while not even satisfying all of the needs of capital in

exceptional and urgent moments of labor, which are required in a given

period of the year from agriculture. It follows, therefore, that a great

number of women and children come to be employed for the momentary need

of capital, past which, these people go on to increase the counties’

overpopulation of workers. This fact has produced the system of

organized gangs in the counties of England.

“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 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, depends 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 “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, and have twice as high a rate of illegitimate births as

the rest of the kingdom…

“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,

clearly does not exist for the sake of the gang-master. It exists for

the enrichment of the large farmers, and indirectly of the landlords”

(Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 25, sec. 5E).

“‘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’” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1,

ch. 25, fn. 114).

“To one of these gentlemen the taste of his rent was so grateful that he

indignantly declared to the Commission of Inquiry that the hole 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” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch.

25, fn. 115).

“‘Gang work is cheaper than other work; that is why they are employed,’

says a former gang-master. ‘The gang-system is decidedly the cheapest

for the farmer, and decidedly the worst for the children,’ says a

farmer” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 25, fn. 116).

“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 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” (Marx,

Capital, vol. 1, ch. 25, sec. 5E).

X. Primitive Accumulation

Here we are at the end of our drama.

We met a worker at the market one day, come to sell his labor power, and

we saw him negotiate as equals with the money-owner. His still didn’t

know how hard the Calvary road would be that he had to climb, not yet

had the most bitter cup approached his lips, all of which had to be

gulped down to the last dregs. The money-owner, not yet become a

capitalist, was nothing more than a modest owner of a little wealth,

timid and uncertain of the success of his new enterprise, in which he

was investing his fortune.

We the saw how the scene came to change.

The worker, after having generated, with his first overwork, capital,

was oppressed by the excessive labor of an extraordinarily prolonged

day. With relative surplus value the labor time necessary for his

maintenance was restricted and that of overwork prolonged, destined to

always nourish capital more richly. In simple cooperation we saw the

worker in a stationary discipline, and, dragged by a current made of a

linking of labor powers, exhausted evermore, by giving greater nutrition

to ever-growing capital. We saw the worker mutilated, crestfallen, and

depressed to the greatest degree by the division of labor, in

manufacturing. We saw him suffering unspeakable material and moral

pains, created for him by the introduction of machinery, in modern

industry. Expropriated of the last bit of artisan virtue, we saw him

reduced to a mere servant of the machine, transformed, from a member of

a living organism, into the most vulgar appendage of a mechanism,

tortured by labor dramatically increased by the machine, which at every

stretch threatens to tear off a shred of his flesh, or to grind him

completely between its terrible gears; and what’s more we saw his wife

and tender children become slaves of capital. And in the meantime the

capitalist, immensely enriched, pays him a salary, which he is able to

lessen at his pleasure, even making a show of keeping it at the same

level as before, and even of increasing it. Finally we saw the worker,

made temporarily useless by the accumulation of capital, passing from

the active industrial army into the reserves, from then on, from this,

falling forever into the hell of pauperism. All the sacrifice is

consummated!

But however was all of this able to happen?

In a very simple way. The worker was, it’s true, the owner of his labor

power, with which he would have been able to produce much more than he

needed for himself and his family every day, but he was lacking however

the other indispensable elements of labor, that is, the means of

production and raw materials. Devoid therefore of any wealth, the worker

was forced, in order to live his life, to sell his only good, his labor

power to the money-owner, who made it his property. Private property and

the wage-worker, foundations of the system of capitalist production,

were the foremost cause of so much pain.

But that is unfair! It’s wicked! And whosoever granted man the right of

private property? And however did the money-owner find himself in

possession of a primitive accumulation, origin of many infamies?

A terrible voice comes forth from the temple of the God of Capital, and

shouts: “All is right, because all is written in the book of eternal

laws. Already a very distant time arose, in which all humans still

roamed free and equal throughout the Earth. Few of these were laborious,

sober and economical; all of the others idlers, revelers and

squanderers. Virtue made the first rich, and vice impoverished the

second. The few had the right to enjoy (these and their descendants) of

the virtuously accumulated wealth; while the many pushed by their misery

to sell themselves to the rich, were condemned to serve those and their

descendants eternally.”

Here is how certain friends of the bourgeois order explain the matter.

“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” (Marx,

Capital, vol. 1, ch. 26).

If such were the origin of primitive accumulation, the theory, which

derives from it, that of original sin and of predestination, would be so

just. The father was an idler and a reveler, the son will suffer the

misery. Such is the son of a rich man, he is predestined to be happy,

powerful, learned, civil, strong, etc.; such is the other son of a poor

man, he is predestined to be unhappy, weak, ignorant, brutish, immoral,

etc. A society, founded upon such a law, would certainly have to end, as

so many other societies already ended, less barbarous and less

hypocritical, so many religions and gods, starting from Christianity, in

whose laws one finds similar examples of justice.

And here we could put an end to our say, if we were allowed to end it

with this bourgeois foolishness. But our drama has a catastrophe worthy

of it, as we will soon see, witnessing its final act.

We begin the story, that history written by the bourgeoisie, and for the

use and consumption of the bourgeoisie; we search in it for the origin

of primitive accumulation, and it’s here that we find it.

In the most ancient age, flocks of nomadic people came to establish

themselves in those places better disposed and more favored by nature.

They founded cities, they devoted themselves to cultivating the land,

and to doing so many other necessary things for their own wellbeing. But

is here that they encounter and collide with each other in their

development, and war follows, deaths, fires, robberies and massacres.

All that belongs to vanquished becomes property of the victors,

including the persons who survived, who are all made slaves.

Here is the origin of primitive accumulation in antiquity. Let’s come

now to the Middle Ages.

In this second age of history, we find nothing other than invasions of

people into countries of other people, richer and more favored by

nature, and always the same refrain of massacres, robberies, fires, etc.

All that belongs to the vanquished becomes property of the victors, with

the sole difference being that the survivors no longer become slaves,

like in the ancient age, but serfs, and they pass with the land, to

which they are joined, into the power of their lords. Therefore not even

in the Middle Ages do we find the slightest trace of the idyllic

laboriousness, sobriety and parsimoniousness praised by a certain

bourgeois doctrine as the origin of primitive accumulation. And notice

that the Middle Ages is the age to which our most illustrious owners of

wealth are able to brag about tracing their origins. But let’s come

finally to the modern age.

The bourgeois revolution has destroyed feudalism, and has transmuted

servitude into wage-work. At the same time, however, it has taken away

from the worker the few means of existence, which the state of servitude

used to ensure for them. The serf, although he had to labor for the

greater part of his time for his lord, also had a piece of land with the

means and the time to cultivate it/to live his life. The bourgeoisie has

destroyed all of that, and from the serf has made a free (?) worker, who

has no other choice, either be exploited in the way that we already saw,

by the first capitalist who happens upon him, or die of hunger.

Let’s now get down to the particulars. Let’s begin the story of a

populace, and let’s see how the expropriation of agricultural

populations came to be, and the formation of the working masses,

destined to provide their labor power to modern industries. We will

take, as usual, the story of England, because if England is the country,

where the disease that we are studying is more developed than elsewhere,

it is given that it will always be able to offer us the most suitable

scope for our practical observations.

“In England, serfdom had practically disappeared in the last part of the

14^(th) century. The immense majority of the population consisted then,

and to a still larger extent, in the 15^(th) 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. …

“The prelude of the revolution that laid the foundation of the

capitalist mode of production, was played in the last third of the

15^(th), and the first decade of the 16^(th) 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 process of forcible expropriation of the people received in the

16^(th) 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 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. ‘Pauper ubique jacet,’

cried Queen Elizabeth, after a journey through England. In the 43^(rd)

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.’ By the 16^(th) of

Charles I., ch. 4, it was declared perpetual, and in fact only in 1834

did it take a new and harsher form” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 27).

“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 43^(rd) 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 (43^(rd) 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’” (Marx, Capital, vol.1, ch. 27, fn. 9).

“The advance made by the 18^(th) 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. 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…

“‘In Northamptonshire and Leicestershire,’ [says Addington,] ‘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.’ 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…’

“‘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 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.’ 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.’ 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…’

“In the 19^(th) 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?”

(Marx, Capital, ch. 27).

For the last expedients of great historic importance, for expropriating

rural workers, one must rightly look to the Highlands of Scotland, where

they had the most savage application. George Ensor, in a book published

in 1818, says:

“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” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1,

ch. 27, fn. 29).

“As an example of the method obtaining in the 19^(th) 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.

“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.

“But, finally, part of the sheep-walks are turned into deer preserves”

(Marx, Capital, ch. 27).

“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 … 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.”’”(Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 27, Note to the second

edition).

Other newspapers, from the same era, speak further of these feudal

instincts, which are more developed in England; but then some of these

conclude, proving with figures, that such a fact has not lessened the

national wealth at all.

“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 15^(th) and during the whole of the 16^(th) 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” (Marx,

Capital, vol. 1, ch. 28).

“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, [as Hollinshed says in his ‘Description of England’]” (Marx,

Capital, vol. 1, ch. 28, fn. 2).

“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 24^(th) year, the girls until the

20^(th). 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. 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 19^(th) century under the name of

‘roundsmen’” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 28).

“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”’” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 28, fn. 1).

“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” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 28).

“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” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 28, fn. 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 18^(th) century, were only repealed [in

1714]” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 28).

And here by means of such horrors, by means of so much blood the

expropriation of the agricultural population is completed, and the

formation of that working class, destined to feed modern industry. Less

than idyllic! It was sword and fire that were the only origin of

primitive accumulation; it was sword and fire that prepared the

necessary environment for capital to develop, the mass of human force

destined to nourish it; and if today sword and fire are no longer the

ordinary means of the ever-growing accumulation, it is because it has

another method, in its stead, much more inexorable and terrible, one of

the glorious modern achievements of the bourgeoisie, a method that forms

a necessary part of the mechanism itself of capitalist production, a

method that acts by itself, without making much noise, without producing

scandal, in short a perfectly civil method: hunger. And for him that

rebels against hunger, always and forever sword and fire.

The modest size of this summary does not permit me to tell also of the

glories of capital in the colonies. I refer the reader to the history of

discoveries, starting from that of Christopher Columbus, and of all the

colonizations, limiting myself only to cite in this regard the words of

“W. Howitt, a man who makes a speciality of Christianity, [who] 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.’

“If money, according to Augier, ‘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.” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 31).

And this is pure, or bourgeois, history, a sad history of blood, which

would deserve to be well read and meditated on by you, who know in your

virtue how to conceive a holy horror for the lust of the blood of modern

revolutionaries; by you, who declare not being able to allow the workers

the sole use of the moral means.

Conclusion

The disease is sweeping. It’s been a long time that the workers of the

civilized world have known it; certainly not all, but a great number,

and these are already preparing the means of action to destroy it.

They have considered these:

• That the first source of every human oppression and exploitation is

private property;

• That the emancipation of workers (human emancipation) will not be

founded upon a new class rule, but upon the end of all class privileges

and monopolies and upon the equality of rights and duties;

• That the cause of labor, the cause of humanity, does not have borders;

• That the emancipation of workers must be done at the hands of the

workers themselves.

And so a mighty voice has shouted: “Workers of the world, unite! No more

rights without duties, no more duties without rights! Revolution!”

But the revolution demanded by the workers is not a revolution of

pretext, it is not the practical method of a moment to reach a given

aim. Even the bourgeoisie, like so many others, demanded the revolution

one day; but only to supplant the nobility, and to substitute for the

feudal system of serfdom that more refined and cruel system of

wage-work. And they call this progress and civility! In fact every day

we help the ridiculous show of the bourgeoisie, who go babbling the word

revolution, with the sole aim of being able to jump up onto the maypole

tree, and to grab power. The workers’ revolution is the revolution for

the revolution.

The word “Revolution”, taken in its largest and truest sense, means

turning, transformation, change. As such, revolution is the soul of all

infinite mass. In fact, all in nature changes, but nothing is created

and nothing is destroyed, as chemistry shows us. Mass, remaining always

in the same quantity, can change form in infinite ways. When mass loses

its old form and acquires a new one, it passes from the old life, in

which it dies, to the new life, in which it is born. When our spinner,

using a familiar example for us, transformed the 10 kilos of cotton into

10 kilos of thread, what else came about if not the death of 10 kilos of

mass in the form of cotton, and at their birth in the form of thread?

And when the weaver transforms the thread into cloth, what else will

come about if not the matter passing from a life of string unto a life

of cloth, as it has passed already before from a life of cotton unto a

life of thread? Mass, therefore, passing from one turn of life to

another, lives ever-changing, transforming, revolutionizing.

Now, if revolution is the law of nature, which is all, it must

necessarily also be the law of humanity, which is a part of nature. But

you have a few men upon the Earth who do not think this is so, or,

rather, who close their eyes so as not to see and their ears so as not

to hear.

“Yes, it is true,” I hear shouting from a bourgeois, “the natural law,

the revolution that you claim, is the absolute regulator of human

relations. The fault of all the oppressions, of all the exploitations,

of all the tears and all of the massacres they are caused by, one must

justly attribute to this inexorable law that imposes revolution upon us,

that is, continuous transformation, the struggle for existence, the

absorption of the weaker made stronger, the sacrifice of the less

perfect types for the development of the more perfect types. If hundreds

of workers are burned up for the wellbeing of only one bourgeois, that

happens without the slightest fault of this, that is indeed sad and

dreary, but only by the decree of natural law, of revolution.”

If one speaks in such a way, the workers ask nothing better, who wish

for transformation, the struggle for existence, revolution, under the

same natural law, the ones indeed preparing themselves to be stronger,

to sacrifice all monstrous and parasitic plants for the complete and

flourishing development of the most beautiful human tree, whole and

perfect, which it must be, in all of the wholeness of its human

character.

But the bourgeoisie are too fearful and pious to be able to appeal to

the natural law of revolution. They have been able to invoke it in a

moment of drunkenness; but, afterwards back to their normal selves,

their accounts done, and having found that their doings were nice and

pleasing, they gave themselves to shouting until they couldn’t anymore:

“Order, religion, family, property, conservation!” It is so that, after

having arrived at conquering, with massacre, fire and robbery, the role

of the dominators and exploiters of the human race, they believe that

they can stop the course of revolution; without realizing, in their

stupidity, that they can do nothing else, with their efforts, than to

make horrible troubles for humanity, and as a consequence for

themselves, with the sudden explosions of the revolutionary force they

madly repress.

The revolution, the material obstacles that oppose it shot down, and

left free in its path, will by itself be enough to create the most

perfect balance, order, peace, and the most complete happiness between

people, because people, in their free development, will not proceed in

the manner of wild animals but in the manner of human beings, eminently

reasonable and civil, who understand that no person can be truly free

and happy if they are not within the common liberty and happiness of all

of humanity. No more rights without duties, no more duties without

right. Therefore no more struggle for existence between people, but

struggle for existence of all people with nature, by appropriating from

the great sum of natural forces for the benefit of all of humanity.

The disease known, it is easy to know the remedy: revolution for the

revolution.

But how will the workers be able to restore the course of the

revolution?

This is not the place for a revolutionary program, already elaborated

and published long ago elsewhere in other books; I confine myself to

conclude, replying with the words taken from the lips of a worker and

placed in epigraph to this volume: “The worker has made everything; and

the worker can destroy everything, because he can rebuild everything.”

Appendix:The Correspondence between Cafiero & Marx

Cafiero to Marx

Les Molières, 27 July 1879

Most Esteemed Sir,

I’m sending with the same courier two copies of your work Capital,

summarized briefly by me. I wanted to deliver them to you sooner, but

only now was I able to obtain some copies by the benevolence of a

friend, who with his intervention was able to affect the publication of

the book.

In fact, if the publication could have been done at my expense, I would

have desired to submit the manuscript to your examination beforehand.

But in fear of seeing a favorable opinion escape me, I hurried to allow

the publication proposed to me. And it is only now that I was able to

address you in the hopes that you may say if I was able to comprehend

and express your exact concept.

I pray, sir, that you appreciate the expressions of my deepest respect

and that you put your trust in me.

Most devotedly,

Carlo Cafiero

Marx to Cafiero

Dear Citizen,

The sincerest of thanks for the two copies of your work! At the same

time I received two similar works, one written in Serbian, the other in

English (published in the United States), but they both are faulty,

wanting to give a succinct and popular summary of Capital and clinging,

at the same time, too pedantically to the scientific form of discussion.

In this way, they seem to me to miss more or less their principle

purpose: that of moving the public for whom the summaries are intended.

And here is the great superiority of your work.

As far as the conception of things, I believe I’m not deceiving myself

in attributing a gap to the considerations espoused in your preface, and

that is the proof that the material conditions necessary to the

emancipation of the proletariat are generated spontaneously by the

development of capitalist exploitation. After all, I agree with you (if

I interpreted your preface well) that it isn’t necessary to overload

those who you wish to educate. Nothing will prevent you from returning,

at the opportune time, to the charge of bringing out this materialist

basis of Capital.

Renewing my thanks, I am most devoted to you,

Karl Marx

[1] See Karl Marx:

Capital. A Critique of Political Economy. Volume I

.

[2] See John Stuart Mill,

Principles of Political Economy

.