Part Seven — The Process of Accumulation of Capital Chapters 23–25. Simple reproduction, the transformation of surplus-value into capital, and the general law of capitalist accumulation.

Everything so far has analysed a single act of production. Part Seven sets the act in motion as a process that renews itself, and shows what that renewal produces beyond commodities and surplus-value: it reproduces the capital-relation itself. Chapter 23 shows that even simple reproduction — where all surplus-value is consumed — sooner or later converts all capital into capitalized surplus-value and perpetually reproduces the worker as a wage-labourer and the capitalist as capitalist. Chapter 24 turns to reproduction on an expanding scale, accumulation proper, and shows how the laws of commodity exchange turn dialectically into their opposite: the right of property becomes the capitalist's right to appropriate unpaid labour. Chapter 25, the culminating theoretical chapter of the volume, traces the effect of accumulation on the working class through the changing composition of capital, arriving at the industrial reserve army and the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation. The reserve-army and immiseration material in Chapter 25 is a charter capture-target and is caught here with sustained engagement.

Production must be continuous, so it is always also reproduction. Viewing capitalist production as a repeating process, rather than a single act, dissolves the illusions that cling to the isolated transaction. Taken across the whole capitalist and working classes, the wage is revealed as a portion of the product the workers themselves have already produced — the capitalist advances to the worker only the worker's own objectified labour. And the mere continuity of the process has a corrosive consequence for the capitalist's claim to have supplied the original capital out of his own labour.

Therefore, entirely leaving aside all accumulation, the mere continuity of the production process, in other words simple reproduction, sooner or later, and necessarily, converts all capital into accumulated capital, or capitalized surplus-value. Even if that capital was, on its entry into the process of production, the personal property of the man who employs it, and was originally acquired by his own labour, it sooner or later becomes value appropriated without an equivalent, the unpaid labour of others materialized either in the money-form or in some other way.

Marx, Capital I, page 715.

What was the presupposition of capitalist production — the separation of the worker from the means of production — becomes its perpetually renewed result. The process does not merely make commodities and surplus-value; it continuously reproduces the two classes and their relation, turning out the worker at the end as it found him at the start, dispossessed, and turning his own labour into the alien power that commands him.

Therefore the worker himself constantly produces objective wealth, in the form of capital, an alien power that dominates and exploits him; and the capitalist just as constantly produces labour-power, in the form of a subjective source of wealth which is abstract, exists merely in the physical body of the worker, and is separated from its own means of objectification and realization; in short, the capitalist produces the worker as a wage-labourer. This incessant reproduction, this perpetuation of the worker, is the absolutely necessary condition for capitalist production.

Marx, Capital I, page 716.

When surplus-value is not consumed but recapitalized, reproduction expands. Marx shows that the second round of accumulation presupposes only the surplus-value seized in the first, so that appropriated unpaid labour becomes the sole basis for appropriating still more.

The ownership of past unpaid labour is thenceforth the sole condition for the appropriation of living unpaid labour on a constantly increasing scale. The more the capitalist has accumulated, the more is he able to accumulate.

Marx, Capital I, page 729.

This is where Marx states the dialectical reversal that his readers have returned to most often. Every individual exchange between capital and labour obeys the law of commodity exchange to the letter — equivalents are traded, no one is defrauded — and yet the cumulative result is the exact inversion of the property principle the exchange began from. The law does not have to be broken; it produces its own negation by being applied.

It is quite evident from this that the laws of appropriation or of private property, laws based on the production and circulation of commodities, become changed into their direct opposite through their own internal and inexorable dialectic. The exchange of equivalents, the original operation with which we started, is now turned round in such a way that there is only an apparent exchange, since, firstly, the capital which is exchanged for labour-power is itself merely a portion of the product of the labour of others which has been appropriated without an equivalent; and, secondly, this capital must not only be replaced by its producer, the worker, but replaced together with an added surplus.

Marx, Capital I, pages 729–730.

Originally the rights of property seemed to us to be grounded in a man's own labour. … Now, however, property turns out to be the right, on the part of the capitalist, to appropriate the unpaid labour of others or its product, and the impossibility, on the part of the worker, of appropriating his own product. The separation of property from labour thus becomes the necessary consequence of a law that apparently originated in their identity.

Marx, Capital I, page 730. The ellipsis drops the sentence recalling why the identity of labour and property was assumed at the outset.

The remainder of the chapter clears away the classical mystifications of accumulation: the "abstinence" theory, which credits the capitalist's self-denial as the source of capital (Marx tracks the Faustian conflict between the capitalist's drive to accumulate and his desire to enjoy), the dogma that all accumulated capital is converted wholly into wages, and the treatment of the wage-fund as a fixed magnitude. Accumulation is not the capitalist's reward for thrift; it is capitalized surplus-value, unpaid labour turned into the means of commanding more unpaid labour.

The volume's culminating theoretical chapter asks what accumulation does to the working class, and it turns on the composition of capital. Marx distinguishes the value-composition (the ratio of constant to variable capital) from the technical composition (the ratio of the mass of means of production to the labour that works them), and names the value-composition insofar as it tracks the technical the organic composition of capital.

As value, it is determined by the proportion in which it is divided into constant capital, or the value of the means of production, and variable capital, or the value of labour-power, the sum total of wages. As material, as it functions in the process of production, all capital is divided into means of production and living labour-power. … I call the former the value-composition, the latter the technical composition of capital. … I call the value-composition of capital, in so far as it is determined by its technical composition and mirrors the changes in the latter, the organic composition of capital.

Marx, Capital I, page 762. Ellipses drop the sentence defining the technical composition as the relation between the mass of means of production and the labour needed to work it, and the note that the organic composition is always meant where composition is used without qualification.

As accumulation proceeds, productivity rises, and the organic composition rises with it: the constant part of capital grows relative to the variable part. Since the demand for labour depends on the variable part alone, it grows more slowly than total capital — and this, not any natural law of population, is what continually produces a surplus working population.

But in fact it is capitalist accumulation itself that constantly produces, and produces indeed in direct relation with its own energy and extent, a relatively redundant working population, i.e. a population which is superfluous to capital's average requirements for its own valorization, and is therefore a surplus population.

Marx, Capital I, page 782.

This surplus population is not an accident or an external misfortune but a product and a lever of accumulation: capital manufactures the very reserve of labour it draws on, a reserve that disciplines the employed and expands or contracts with the trade cycle.

The working population therefore produces both the accumulation of capital and the means by which it is itself made relatively superfluous; and it does this to an extent which is always increasing. This is a law of population peculiar to the capitalist mode of production.

Marx, Capital I, pages 783–784.

But if a surplus population of workers is a necessary product of accumulation or of the development of wealth on a capitalist basis, this surplus population also becomes, conversely, the lever of capitalist accumulation, indeed it becomes a condition for the existence of the capitalist mode of production. It forms a disposable industrial reserve army, which belongs to capital just as absolutely as if the latter had bred it at its own cost.

Marx, Capital I, page 784.

From this Marx states the "absolute general law of capitalist accumulation": the same growth of wealth that swells the active proletariat swells the reserve army and, with it, pauperism. Wealth and misery grow together, as two poles of one process.

The greater the social wealth, the functioning capital, the extent and energy of its growth, and therefore also the greater the absolute mass of the proletariat and the productivity of its labour, the greater is the industrial reserve army. … The more extensive, finally, the pauperized sections of the working class and the industrial reserve army, the greater is official pauperism. This is the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation.

Marx, Capital I, page 798. The ellipsis drops the intervening sentences on the reserve army's misery standing in inverse ratio to the torture of its labour.

Marx then gathers the whole indictment of Part Four into the accumulation process, and states the immiseration thesis in its strongest form: the methods that raise social productivity are, under capital, methods of degrading the producer, so that the worker's condition worsens as capital grows, whatever his wage.

Within the capitalist system all methods for raising the social productivity of labour are put into effect at the cost of the individual worker; … they distort the worker into a fragment of a man, they degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, they destroy the actual content of his labour by turning it into a torment; they alienate [entfremden] from him the intellectual potentialities of the labour process in the same proportion as science is incorporated in it as an independent power; … they transform his life-time into working-time, and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the juggernaut of capital.

Marx, Capital I, page 799. Ellipses drop clauses within Marx's enumeration of the methods' effects.

It follows therefore that in proportion as capital accumulates, the situation of the worker, be his payment high or low, must grow worse. … Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, the torment of labour, slavery, ignorance, brutalization and moral degradation at the opposite pole, i.e. on the side of the class that produces its own product as capital.

Marx, Capital I, page 799. The ellipsis drops the sentence on the reserve army riveting the worker to capital more firmly than Hephaestus's wedges held Prometheus.

The chapter's long final section illustrates the law from the British record — the badly paid strata of the employed, the nomadic and agricultural populations, Ireland — assembling from the Blue Books and census returns the empirical demonstration that accumulation and pauperization advance together. This documentary material is reconstructed rather than quoted whole; the theoretical spine above is what the law rests on.