The Accumulation of Capital

onclusions to which Smith

'the produce of labour necessary for fashioning those materials into the proper form'.[77] By singling out the production of such fixed capital as of a special kind, and explicitly contrasting it with the pro

fixed, or constant, capital, there remains only the category of consumer go

annot be capital for the individual; it must be revenue, too, a fund of consumption, comprising as it does those parts of fixed capital which represent the workers' wages and the capit

trace of capital remains. It can be resolved completely into t

leave us infinitely remote from the solution of the problem how social capital is annually renewed, how everybody's consumption is ensured by his income, while the individuals can nevertheless adhere to their own poin

alone would suffice to wreck the treatment of t

ication of human labour with capitalist wage labour is indeed the classical element in Smith's doctrine. The value of the aggregate product of society comprises both the recompense for wages advanced and a surplus from unpaid labour appearing as profit for the capitalist and rent for the landowner. What holds goo

rsued this matter for a long time without getting anywhere at first as witness his Theories of the Surplus Value,[78] proves that this theoretical problem is indeed extremely hard to solve. Yet the solution he eventually hit on was strikingly successful, and it is based upon his theory of value. Adam Smith was perfectly right: nothing but labour constitutes the value of the individual commodity and of the aggregate of commodities. He was equally right in saying that from a capitalist point of view all labour is either paid labour which restores the wages, or unpaid labour which, as surplus value, accrues to the various classes owning the means of production. What he forgot, however, or rather overlooked, is the fact that, apart from being able to create new value, labour can also transfer to the new commodities the old values incorporated

abour as performed with the help of tools which themselves are already products of antecedent labour. Every new product thus contains not only the new labour whereby it is given its final form, but also past labour which had supplied the materials for it, the instruments of labour and so forth. In the production of value, that is commodity production into which capitalist production also enters, this phenomenon is not suspended, it only receives a particular expression. Here the labour which produces commodities assumes a twofold characteristic: it is on the one hand useful concrete labour of some kind or other, creating the useful object, the value-in-use. On the other hand, it is abstract, general, socia

ced values can be completely resolved into v + s-in his fundamentally erroneous theory of value.[79] Failure to differentiate between the two aspects of commodity-producing labour as concrete and useful labour on the

re is a fundamental distinction, however, between Marx's theory of value and Ricardo's, a distinction which has been misunderstood not only by bourgeois economists but also in most cases by the popularisers of Marx's doctrine:

culiar to human nature, having looked for it in vain in animals, particularly in dogs. And although he doubted the existence of the propensity to exchange in a

ive labour than that of the farmer. Not only his labouring serva

n of a value equal to their own consumption, or to the capital which employs them, together with its owner's profits, but of a much greater v

as the spider produces its web from its own body, so labouring man produces value-labouring man pure and simple, every man who produces useful objects-because labouring man is

ons. Thus he came to discriminate between the two aspects of commodity-producing labour: concrete individual labour and socially necessary

f commodities is a definite historical form of social production before he could decipher the hieroglyphics of capitalist economy. In a word, Marx had to approach the problem with methods of deduction diametrically opposed to those of the classical school,

ely resolved into v + s. We should be wrong to assume that Smith lost sight of the fact that every commodity produced contains not only the value created by its production, but also the values incorporated in all the means of production that had been spent upon it in the process of manufacturing it. By the very fact that he continually refers us from one stage of production to a

erhaps be thought, is necessary for replacing the stock of the farmer, or for compensating the wear and tear of his labouring cattle and other instruments of husbandry. But it must be considered that the price of any instrument of husbandry, such as a labouring horse, is itself made up of the same three parts: the rent of the land upon which he is reared, the la

abour? Flour is a means of production to which the baker adds new labour. Yet flour is the result of the miller's work, and in his hands it was not a means of production but the very product, in the same way as now the bread and pastries are the product of the baker. This product, flour, again pr

pital which has been completely used up in the manufacture of any commodi

a certain quantity of labour. What is true for every commodity, must go also for the aggregate of commodities produced

which restores the wages advanced, and unpaid labour which creates profit and rent, or surplus v

t approach. Only occasionally, in his third thesis, he went astray in his final conclusion, saying that the aggregate value of the annually produced aggregate of commodities can be resolved into the labour of that very year, although he himself had be

etely wiped out. It is different with the constant capital which has been advanced and invested in means of production, because every activity of labour requires certain raw materials, tools, and buildings. The capitalist character of this state of affairs is expressed by the fact that these means of production appear as capital, as c, the property of a person other than the labourer, divorced from labour, the property of those who themselves do not work. Secondly, the constant capital c, a mere advance laid out for the purpose of creating surplus value, appears here only as the foundation of v + s. Yet the concept of constant capital involves more than this: it expresses the function of the means of production in the process of human labour, quite independently of all its historical or social forms. Everybody must have raw materials and working tools, the means of production, be it the South Sea Islander for making his family canoe, the communist peasant community in India for the cultivation of their communal land, the Egyptian fellah for tilling his village lands or for building Pharaoh's pyramids, the Greek slave in the small workshops of Athens, the feudal serf, the master craftsman of the medieval guild, or the modern wage labourer. They all require means of production which, having resulted from human labour, express the link between human labour and natural matter, and constitute the eternal and universal prerequisites of the human process of production. c in the formula c + v + s stands for a certain function of the means of production which is not wiped out in the succession of the labour process. Whereas it is completely immaterial, for both the exchange and the actual use made of a commodity, whether it has been produced by paid or by unpaid labour, by wage labour, slave labour, forced labour or any other kind of labour; on the other hand, it is of decisive importance, as for using it, whether the commodity is itself a means of production or a consumer good. Whether paid or unpaid labour has been employed in the production of a machine, matters to the machinery manufacturer

gains possession of the variable capital. His labour power is never capital to him, but it is his only asset, the power to work is the only thing he possesses. Again, if he has sold it and taken a money wage, this wage is for him not capital but the price of his commodity which he has sold. Finally, the fact that the worker buys provisions with the wages he has received, has no more connection with the function this money once fulfilled as variable capital in the hands of the capitalist, than has the private use a vendor of a commodity can make of the money he has obtained by a sale. It is not the capitalist's variable capital which becomes the workers' income, but the price of the worker's commodity 'labour power' which he has sold, while the variable capital, now as ever, remains in the hands of the capitalist and fulfils its specific function. Equally erroneous is the conception that the income of the capitalist (the surplus value) which is hidden in machines-in our example of a machinery manufacturer-which has not as yet been realised, is fixed capital for another person, the buyer of

se of consumption. The fallacy that whatever is capital for one person must be income for another, and vice versa, must be translated thus into the correct statement that what is circulation of capital for one person, may be simple commodity exchange for another, and vice versa. This only expresses the capacity of capital to undergo transformations of its character, and the interconnections of various spheres of interest in the social process o