Capital: Volume I

Section 4: The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof

The Greed for Surplus-Labour. Manufacturer and Boyard

Transition of the Laws of Property that Characterise Production of Commodities into Laws of Capitalist Appropriation

Chapter 28: Bloody Legislation Against the Expropriated, from the End of the 15th Century. Forcing Down of Wages by Acts of Parliament

In the analysis of economic forms, moreover, neither microscopes nor chemical reagents are of use. The force of abstraction must replace both.

We suffer not only from the living, but from the dead. Le mort saisit le vif!

Perseus wore a magic cap down over his eyes and ears as a make-believe that there are no monsters.

There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits.

The theoretical expression of a foreign reality was turned, in their hands, into a collection of dogmas, interpreted by them in terms of the petty trading world around them, and therefore misinterpreted.

In so far as Political Economy remains within that horizon, i.e., as the capitalist regime is looked upon as the absolutely final form of social production, instead of as a passing historical phase of its evolution, Political Economy can remain a science only so long as the class struggle is latent.

In place of disinterested inquirers, there were hired prize fighters; in place of genuine scientific research, the bad conscience and the evil intent of apologetic.

Just as in the classical time of bourgeois economy, so also in the time of its decline, the Germans remained mere schoolboys, imitators and followers, petty retailers and hawkers in the service of the great foreign wholesale concern.

Marx treats the social movement as a process of natural history, governed by laws not only independent of human will, consciousness and intelligence, but rather, on the contrary, determining that will, consciousness and intelligence.

With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought.

In its rational form it is a scandal and abomination to bourgeoisdom and its doctrinaire professors, because it includes in its comprehension and affirmative recognition of the existing state of things, at the same time also, the recognition of the negation of that state, of its inevitable breaking up.

But the French would rightly consider any economist crazy should he call the capitalist a donneur de travail (a labour-giver) or the worker a receveur de travail (a labour-taker).

And that was a very necessary thing in a science whose historians have so far distinguished themselves only by tendentious ignorance characteristic of careerists.

Every new aspect of a science involves a revolution in the technical terms of that science.

“Das Kapital” is often called, on the Continent, “the Bible of the working class.”

The sighed for period of prosperity will not come; as often as we seem to perceive its heralding symptoms, so often do they again vanish into air.

But anyone who compares the fourth edition with the previous ones can convince himself that all this laborious process of emendation has not produced the smallest change in the book worth speaking of.

In the version which he afterwards manipulated, Mr. Gladstone was astute enough to obliterate this passage, which, coming from an English Chancellor of the Exchequer, was certainly compromising.

Marx further established once more, by a comparison of The Times and the Hansard texts, that this sentence... was missing from the Hansard report, revised according to the familiar ‘custom,’ and that Gladstone, to use Marx’s words, ‘had afterwards conjured it away.’

Thus he stood, sword in hand, and thus he battled, in his “masterly conduct of the attack,” this St. George of the German Manufacturers’ Association, whilst the infernal dragon Marx, “in deadly shifts,” “speedily” breathed his last at his feet.

The nature of such wants, whether, for instance, they spring from the stomach or from fancy, makes no difference.

The two things must therefore be equal to a third, which in itself is neither the one nor the other.

When looked at as crystals of this social substance, common to them all, they are – Values.

As values, all commodities are only definite masses of congealed labour time.

If we could succeed at a small expenditure of labour, in converting carbon into diamonds, their value might fall below that of bricks.

As this point is the pivot on which a clear comprehension of political economy turns, we must go more into detail.

So far therefore as labour is a creator of use value, is useful labour, it is a necessary condition, independent of all forms of society, for the existence of the human race; it is an eternal nature -imposed necessity, without which there can be no material exchanges between man and Nature, and therefore no life.

Tailoring and weaving, though qualitatively different productive activities, are each a productive expenditure of human brains, nerves, and muscles, and in this sense are human labour.

And just as in society, a general or a banker plays a great part, but mere man, on the other hand, a very shabby part, so here with mere human labour.

This antagonistic movement has its origin in the two-fold character of labour.

The value of commodities is the very opposite of the coarse materiality of their substance, not an atom of matter enters into its composition.

The relative form and the equivalent form are two intimately connected, mutually dependent and inseparable elements of the expression of value; but, at the same time, are mutually exclusive, antagonistic extremes – i.e., poles of the same expression.

If we say that, as values, commodities are mere congelations of human labour, we reduce them by our analysis, it is true, to the abstraction, value; but we ascribe to this value no form apart from their bodily form.

The fact that it is value, is made manifest by its equality with the coat, just as the sheep’s nature of a Christian is shown in his resemblance to the Lamb of God.

The equation, 20 yards of linen = 1 coat, or 20 yards of linen are worth one coat, implies that the same quantity of value substance (congealed labour) is embodied in both.

Thus real changes in the magnitude of value are neither unequivocally nor exhaustively reflected in their relative expression, that is, in the equation expressing the magnitude of relative value.

The first peculiarity that strikes us, in considering the form of the equivalent, is this: use value becomes the form of manifestation, the phenomenal form of its opposite, value.

The iron, in the expression of the weight of the sugar-loaf, represents a natural property common to both bodies, namely their weight; but the coat, in the expression of value of the linen, represents a non-natural property of both, something purely social, namely, their value.

He has not the least suspicion that the most simple expression of value, such as 20 yds of linen = 1 coat, already propounds the riddle of the equivalent form for our solution.

The secret of the expression of value, namely, that all kinds of labour are equal and equivalent, because, and so far as they are human labour in general, cannot be deciphered, until the notion of human equality has already acquired the fixity of a popular prejudice.

It never assumes this form when isolated, but only when placed in a value or exchange relation with another commodity of a different kind.

The opposition or contrast existing internally in each commodity between use value and value, is, therefore, made evident externally by two commodities being placed in such relation to each other.

As a commodity, it is a citizen of that world.

In the second place, it is a many-coloured mosaic of disparate and independent expressions of value.

The substance linen becomes the visible incarnation, the social chrysalis state of every kind of human labour.

The general value form, which represents all products of labour as mere congelations of undifferentiated human labour, shows by its very structure that it is the social resumé of the world of commodities.

It becomes the special social function of that commodity, and consequently its social monopoly, to play within the world of commodities the part of the universal equivalent.

But, so soon as it steps forth as a commodity, it is changed into something transcendent. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than “table-turning” ever was.

A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour.

There it is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things.

To them, their own social action takes the form of the action of objects, which rule the producers instead of being ruled by them.

He begins, post festum, with the results of the process of development ready to hand before him.

The whole mystery of commodities, all the magic and necromancy that surrounds the products of labour as long as they take the form of commodities, vanishes therefore, so soon as we come to other forms of production.

These different articles are, as regards the family, so many products of its labour, but as between themselves, they are not commodities.

Trading nations, properly so called, exist in the ancient world only in its interstices, like the gods of Epicurus in the Intermundia, or like Jews in the pores of Polish society.

The life-process of society, which is based on the process of material production, does not strip off its mystical veil until it is treated as production by freely associated men, and is consciously regulated by them in accordance with a settled plan.

So far no chemist has ever discovered exchange value either in a pearl or a diamond.

Now we know the substance of

Joining together and separating are the only elements which the human mind always finds on analysing the concept of reproduction and it is just the same with the reproduction of value.

The labour which creates use value, and counts qualitatively, is Work, as distinguished from Labour, that which creates Value and counts quantitatively, is Labour as distinguished from Work.

Peter only establishes his own identity as a man by first comparing himself with Paul as being of like kind.

It may therefore be imagined that all commodities can simultaneously have this character impressed upon them, just as it can be imagined that all Catholics can be popes together.

On this occasion he commits the anachronism of making these men apply to the calculation, so far as their implements have to be taken into account, the annuity tables in current use on the London Exchange in the year 1817.

Even Adam Smith and Ricardo, the best representatives of the school, treat the form of value as a thing of no importance, as having no connection with the inherent nature of commodities.

Thus there has been history, but there is no longer any.

This much, however, is clear, that the middle ages could not live on Catholicism, nor the ancient world on politics.

A born leveller and a cynic, it is always ready to exchange not only soul, but body, with any and every other commodity, be the same more repulsive than Maritornes herself.

Money is a crystal formed of necessity in the course of the exchanges, whereby different products of labour are practically equated to one another and thus by practice converted into commodities.

The exchange of commodities, therefore, first begins on the boundaries of such communities, at their points of contact with other similar communities, or with members of the latter.

The truth of the proposition that, “although gold and silver are not by Nature money, money is by Nature gold and silver,”

In this sense every commodity is a symbol, since, in so far as it is value, it is only the material envelope of the human labour spent upon it.

These objects, gold and silver, just as they come out of the bowels of the earth, are forthwith the direct incarnation of all human labour.

We might just as well try to retain Catholicism without the Pope.

Lawyers started long before economists the idea that money is a mere symbol, and that the value of the precious metals is purely imaginary.

Money as a measure of value, is the phenomenal form that must of necessity be assumed by that measure of value which is immanent in commodities, labour-time.

Their owner must, therefore, lend them his tongue, or hang a ticket on them, before their prices can be communicated to the outside world.

It is the measure of value inasmuch as it is the socially recognised incarnation of human labour; it is the standard of price inasmuch as it is a fixed weight of metal.

The debasing of money carried on for centuries by kings and princes to such an extent that, of the original weights of the coins, nothing in fact remained but the names.

Since the standard of money is on the one hand purely conventional, and must on the other hand find general acceptance, it is in the end regulated by law.

Objects that in themselves are no commodities, such as conscience, honour, &c., are capable of being offered for sale by their holders, and of thus acquiring, through their price, the form of commodities.

The ellipse is a form of motion which, while allowing this contradiction to go on, at the same time reconciles it.

The leap taken by value from the body of the commodity, into the body of the gold, is, as I have elsewhere called it, the salto mortale of the commodity.

If the market cannot stomach the whole quantity at the normal price of 2 shillings a yard, this proves that too great a portion of the total labour of the community has been expended in the form of weaving.

We see then, commodities are in love with money, but “the course of true love never did run smooth.”

Hence, money may be dirt, although dirt is not money.

Non olet, from whatever source it may come.

Circulation sweats money from every pore.

If the interval in time between the two complementary phases of the complete metamorphosis of a commodity become too great, if the split between the sale and the purchase become too pronounced, the intimate connexion between them, their oneness, asserts itself by producing – a crisis.

The result is not the return of the money, but its continued removal further and further away from its starting-point.

The very nature of the circulation of commodities begets the opposite appearance.

The first metamorphosis of the linen puts these coins into the weaver’s pocket, the second draws them out of it.

Nevertheless, one commodity infects another through their common value-relation, so that their prices, expressed in gold or in silver, gradually settle down into the proportions determined by their comparative values.

It requires but little racking of brains to comprehend that if one quarter of wheat costs £2, 100 quarters will cost £200, 200 quarters £400, and so on, that consequently the quantity of money that changes place with the wheat, when sold, must increase with the quantity of that wheat.

But once in circulation, coins are, so to say, made responsible for one another.

Hence, in the velocity of the currency we have the fluent unity of the antithetical and complementary phases, the unity of the conversion of the useful aspect of commodities into their value-aspect, and their re-conversion from the latter aspect to the former.

The different national uniforms worn at home by gold and silver as coins, and doffed again in the market of the world, indicate the separation between the internal or national spheres of the circulation of commodities, and their universal sphere.

The natural tendency of circulation to convert coins into a mere semblance of what they profess to be, into a symbol of the weight of metal they are officially supposed to contain, is recognised by modern legislation.

If the quantity of paper money issued be double what it ought to be, then, as a matter of fact, £1 would be the money-name not of 1/4 of an ounce, but of 1/8 of an ounce of gold.

Its functional existence absorbs, so to say, its material existence.

The circulation becomes the great social retort into which everything is thrown, to come out again as a gold-crystal.

Modern society, which, soon after its birth, pulled Plutus by the hair of his head from the bowels of the earth, greets gold as its Holy Grail, as the glittering incarnation of the very principle of its own life.

At one time money must be attracted in order to act as circulating coin, at another, circulating coin must be repelled in order to act again as more or less stagnant money.

The class-struggles of the ancient world took the form chiefly of a contest between debtors and creditors, which in Rome ended in the ruin of the plebeian debtors.

As the hart pants after fresh water, so pants his soul after money, the only wealth.

The unspeakable misery of the French agricultural population under Louis XIV. was due not only to the weight of the taxes, but also to the conversion of taxes in kind into money taxes.

In the markets of the world, the value of commodities is expressed so as to be universally recognised.

it is, with some exceptions, an indication of stagnation in the circulation of commodities, of an interruption in the even flow of their metamorphoses.

Owen’s “labour-money,” for instance, is no more “money” than a ticket for the theatre.

The result of all experience and history with regard to this equation is simply that, where two commodities perform by law the functions of a measure of value, in practice one alone maintains that position.

“If the wealth of a nation” he remarks, “could be decupled by a proclamation, it were strange that such proclamations have not long since been made by our Governors.”

The first is the identification of the circulation of commodities with the direct barter of products, by simple abstraction from their points of difference.

When necessary, it does nothing but slide from hand to hand, without stopping for a moment.

Now, as the proportion of the number of farthings requisite in commerce is to be taken from the number of people, the frequency of their exchanges: as also, and principally, from the value of the smallest silver pieces of money.

The channel of circulation necessarily draws to itself a sum sufficient to fill it, and never admits any more.

we do not know whether to admire more the simplicity of the man, or that of the public, who took him, in good faith, for the Adam Smith he announced himself to be

Thus the nation has been abused, and made to pay for the twisting of straw for asses to eat.

This yellow slave will knit and break religions; bless the accurs’d; make the hoar leprosy ador’d; place thieves, and give them title, knee and approbation, with senators on the bench.

The buckets work alternately; when money is scarce, bullion is coined; when bullion is scarce, money is melted.

On one occasion (1839) an old grasping banker (in the city) in his private room raised the lid of the desk he sat over, and displayed to a friend rolls of bank- notes, saying with intense glee there were £600,000 of them, they were held to make money tight, and would all be let out after three o’clock on the same day.

Money has become the executioner of all things; it declares war on the whole human race.

They sent round to all the different banks to borrow, but could not get them, and many of the transactions were adjusted by slips of paper only; yet by three o’clock the whole of the notes were returned into the banks from which they had issued!

One may thus gauge the utopianism of the bimetallist idea that compulsory international quotation will raise silver again to the old value ratio of 1:15-1/2.

Money is but the fat of the Body Politick, whereof too much doth as often hinder its agility, as too little makes it sick.

All new capital, to commence with, comes on the stage, that is, on the market, whether of commodities, labour, or money, even in our days, in the shape of money that by a definite process has to be transformed into capital.

He lets the money go, but only with the sly intention of getting it back again.

In the circuit C—M—C, the expenditure of money has nothing to do with its reflux. On the other hand, in M—C—M, the reflux of the money is conditioned by the very mode of its expenditure.

To exchange £100 for cotton, and then this same cotton again for £100, is merely a roundabout way of exchanging money for money, the same for the same, and appears to be an operation just as purposeless as it is absurd.

This boundless greed after riches, this passionate chase after exchange-value, is common to the capitalist and the miser; but while the miser is merely a capitalist gone mad, the capitalist is a rational miser.

Because it is value, it has acquired the occult quality of being able to add value to itself. It brings forth living offspring, or, at the least, lays golden eggs.

The contrast between the power, based on the personal relations of dominion and servitude, that is conferred by landed property, and the impersonal power that is given by money, is well expressed by the two French proverbs, ‘Nulle terre sans seigneur,’ and ‘L’argent n’a pas de maître.’

Just as every art that is not a means to an end, but an end in itself, has no limit to its aims, because it seeks constantly to approach nearer and nearer to that end, while those arts that pursue means to an end, are not boundless, since the goal itself imposes a limit upon them.

Capital: ‘portion fructifiante de la richesse accumule... valeur permanente, multipliante.’

Not content with that, A and B would declare that the whole series was superfluous and nothing but Hokus Pokus; that for the future A would buy direct from B, and B sell direct to A.

Where equality exists there can be no gain.

But commodities are not paid for twice over, once on account of their use-value, and again on account of their value.

Our friend gained 10 as a seller only to lose it again as a buyer.

The provincials cheated the Romans, and thus got back from their conquerors, in the course of trade, a portion of the tribute. Yet, for all that, the conquered were the really cheated.

It is in this sense that Franklin says, 'war is robbery, commerce is generally cheating.'

It must have its origin both in circulation and yet not in circulation.

Exchange is by its nature a contract which rests on equality, i.e., it takes place between two equal values, and it is not a means of self-enrichment, since as much is given as is received.

The exchange of two unequal values ... adds to the wealth of one person what it removes from the wealth of another.

How can we account for the origin of capital on the supposition that prices are regulated by the average price, i. e., ultimately by the value of the commodities?

In order to be able to extract value from the consumption of a commodity, our friend, Moneybags, must be so lucky as to find, within the sphere of circulation, in the market, a commodity, whose use-value possesses the peculiar property of being a source of value.

Nature does not produce on the one side owners of money or commodities, and on the other men possessing nothing but their own labour-power.

But thereby a definite quantity of human muscle, nerve, brain, &c., is wasted, and these require to be restored.

If the price of labour-power fall to this minimum, it falls below its value, since under such circumstances it can be maintained and developed only in a crippled state.

If his capacity for labour remains unsold, the labourer derives no benefit from it, but rather he will feel it to be a cruel nature-imposed necessity.

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.

By means of advances, repayable in labour, which are handed down from generation to generation, not only the individual labourer, but his family, become, de facto, the property of other persons and their families.

The undersellers, almost without exception, sell bread adulterated with alum, soap, pearl ashes, chalk, Derbyshire stone-dust, and such like agreeable nourishing and wholesome ingredients.

But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality.

Thus Nature becomes one of the organs of his activity, one that he annexes to his own bodily organs, adding stature to himself in spite of the Bible.

That which in the labourer appeared as movement, now appears in the product as a fixed quality without motion.

Animals and plants, which we are accustomed to consider as products of Nature, are in their present form, not only products of, say last year’s labour, but the result of a gradual transformation, continued through many generations, under man’s superintendence, and by means of his labour.

Living labour must seize upon these things and rouse them from their death-sleep, change them from mere possible use-values into real and effective ones.

By the purchase of labour-power, the capitalist incorporates labour, as a living ferment, with the lifeless constituents of the product.

His aim is to produce not only a use-value, but a commodity also; not only use-value, but value; not only value, but at the same time surplus-value.

The spindle and cotton, instead of resting quietly side by side, join together in the process, their forms are altered, and they are turned into yarn; but their value is no more affected by this fact than it would be if they had been simply exchanged for their equivalent in yarn.

expressed in the price of twelve shillings, are therefore constituent parts of the value of the yarn, or, in other words, of the value of the product.

While the labourer is at work, his labour constantly undergoes a transformation: from being motion, it becomes an object without motion; from being the labourer working, it becomes the thing produced.

Our capitalist stares in astonishment. The value of the product is exactly equal to the value of the capital advanced.

The way to Hell is paved with good intentions, and he might just as easily have intended to make money, without producing at all.

His overlooker and his manager try to hide their smiles. Meanwhile, after a hearty laugh, he re-assumes his usual mien.

The circumstance, that on the one hand the daily sustenance of labour-power costs only half a day’s labour, while on the other hand the very same labour-power can work during a whole day, that consequently the value which its use during one day creates, is double what he pays for that use, this circumstance is, without doubt, a piece of good luck for the buyer, but by no means an injury to the seller.

By incorporating living labour with their dead substance, the capitalist at the same time converts value, i.e., past, materialised, and dead labour into capital, into value big with value, a live monster that is fruitful and multiplies.

In the making of jewellery, just as in spinning, the surplus-value results only from a quantitative excess of labour, from a lengthening-out of one and the same labour-process.

In the first stone which he flings at the wild animal he pursues, in the first stick that he seizes to strike down the fruit which hangs above his reach, we see the appropriation of one article for the purpose of aiding in the acquisition of another, and thus discover the origin of capital.

The expression ‘addition’ gives a very clear picture of the way in which the price of a manufactured product is formed; this price is only the sum of a number of values which have been consumed, and it is arrived at by adding them together; however, addition is not the same as multiplication.

He convinces himself with immense satisfaction, that he is a different being, by treating the one unmercifully and damaging the other con amore.

The distinction between skilled and unskilled labour rests in part on pure illusion, or, to say the least, on distinctions that have long since ceased to be real, and that survive only by virtue of a traditional convention.

But, by the very act of adding new value, he preserves their former values.

In so far then as labour is such specific productive activity, in so far as it is spinning, weaving, or forging, it raises, by mere contact, the means of production from the dead, makes them living factors of the labour-process, and combines with them to form the new products.

Hence at one and the same time there is produced a two-fold result.

Of course, it may be said in one sense, t hat the labourer preserves old value always in proportion to the quantity of

The corpses of machines, tools, workshops, &c., are always separate and distinct from the product they helped to turn out.

At the same time, though with diminishing vitality, the machine as a whole continues to take part in the labour-process.

It deserts the consumed body, to occupy the newly created one.

The property therefore which labour-power in action, living labour, possesses of preserving value, at the same time that it adds it, is a gift of Nature which costs the labourer nothing, but which is very advantageous to the capitalist.

The action of labour-power, therefore, not only reproduces its own value, but produces value over and above it.

This part of capital is continually being transformed from a constant into a variable magnitude.

If in consequence of a new invention, machinery of a particular kind can be produced by a diminished expenditure of labour, the old machinery becomes depreciated more or less, and consequently transfers so much less value to the product.

But in the text we deal with that wear and tear, which no doctor can cure, and which little by little brings about death.

The weather and the natural principle of decay do not suspend their operations because the steam-engine ceases to revolve.

The original capital has now changed from C to C', from £500 to £590. The difference is s or a surplus-value of £90.

In the process of production the place of the £90 is taken by the labour-power in action, dead labour is replaced by living labour, something stagnant by something flowing, a constant by a variable.

The circumstance, however, that retorts and other vessels, are necessary to a chemical process, does not compel the chemist to notice them in the result of his analysis.

He creates surplus-value which, for the capitalist, has all the charms of a creation out of nothing.

But in truth, the rate of surplus-value is not equal to s/C or s/(c+v), but to s/v: thus it is not 90/500 but 90/90 or 100%, which is more than five times the apparent degree of exploitation.

The labourer employs more than one half of his working day in producing the surplus-value, which different persons, under different pretexts, share amongst themselves.

It is just as if the cotton had converted itself into yarn, without help; as if the shape it had assumed was mere trickery and deceit.

In this way the poor spinner is made to perform the two-fold miracle not only of producing cotton, spindles, steam-engine, coal, oil, &c., at the same time that he spins with them, but also of turning one working day into five.

Now the following analysis (!) will show that in a mill so worked, the whole net profit is derived from the last hour.

He employs one portion of these 11½ hours, in producing or replacing his wages, and the remaining portion in producing your net profit.

But this dreadful “last hour,” about which you have invented more stories than have the millenarians about the day of judgment, is “all bosh.”

Since the production of surplus-value is the chief end and aim of capitalist production, it is clear, that the greatness of a man’s or a nation’s wealth should be measured, not by the absolute quantity produced, but by the relative magnitude of the surplus-produce.

It is, besides their real ignorance, their apologetic dread of a scientific analysis of value and surplus-value, and of obtaining a result, possibly not altogether palatable to the powers that be.

Since 1848, the factory inspectors have never tired of twitting the masters with this 'last,' this 'fatal hour.'

The atmosphere of the flax mills, in which the children of these virtuous and tender parents work, is so loaded with dust and fibre from the raw material, that it is exceptionally unpleasant to stand even 10 minutes in the spinning rooms.

Such cruel talk about “idleness and vice” ought to be branded as the purest cant, and the most shameless hypocrisy.

The working day is, therefore, determinable, but is, per se, indeterminate.

Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.

Between equal rights force decides.

But in proportion, as the export of cotton became of vital interest to these states, the over-working of the negro and sometimes the using up of his life in 7 years of labour became a factor in a calculated and calculating system.

In dry words, the Réglement itself declares with true Russian irony that by 12 working days one must understand the product of the manual labour of 36 days, by 1 day of field labour 3 days, and by 1 day of wood carrying in like manner three times as much.

The same blind eagerness for plunder that in the one case exhausted the soil, had, in the other, torn up by the roots the living force of the nation.

These 'small thefts' of capital from the labourer’s meal and recreation time, the factory inspectors also designate as 'petty pilferings of minutes.'

Is their black-market, their lash, and their barter of human flesh more detestable than this slow sacrifice of humanity which takes place in order that veils and collars may be fabricated for the benefit of capitalists?

Dante would have found the worst horrors of his Inferno surpassed in this manufacture.

I have often knelt down to feed him as he stood by the machine, for he could not leave it or stop.

Englishmen, always well up in the Bible, knew well enough that man, unless by elective grace a capitalist, or landlord, or sinecurist, is commanded to eat his bread in the sweat of his brow, but they did not know that he had to eat daily in his bread a certain quantity of human perspiration mixed with the discharge of abscesses, cobwebs, dead black-beetles, and putrid German yeast.

They only exist now by first defrauding the public, and next getting 18 hours’ work out of their men for 12 hours’ wages.

They were ordinary men, not Cyclops. At a certain point their labour-power failed. Torpor seized them. Their brain ceased to think, their eyes to see.

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.

It quenches only in a slight degree the vampire thirst for the living blood of labour.

Slept on the floor of the furnace, over head, with an apron under me, and a bit of a jacket over me.

The men would not like so well not to have boys under them, as men would be less obedient.

If they were kept up there would be a waste of fuel (instead of, as now, a waste of the living substance of the workers), and if they were not, there would be loss of time in laying the fires and getting the heat up.

It higgles over a meal-time, incorporating it where possible with the process of production itself, so that food is given to the labourer as to a mere means of production, as coal is supplied to the boiler, grease and oil to the machinery.

They were in effect as regularly sold to these [Manchester] manufacturers as slaves are sold to the cotton-grower in the United States.

Après moi le déluge! is the watchword of every capitalist and of every capitalist nation.

It takes centuries ere the “free” labourer, thanks to the development of capitalistic production, agrees, i.e., is compelled by social conditions, to sell the whole of his active life, his very capacity for work, for the price of the necessaries of life, his birth-right for a mess of pottage.

The fact that they could live for a whole week on the wage of four days, did not appear to the labourers a sufficient reason that they should work the other two days for the capitalist.

And what sort of workmanship could we expect from such hard-driven animals?

The 'House of Terror' for paupers of which the capitalistic soul of 1770 only dreamed, was realised a few years later in the shape of a gigantic 'Workhouse' for the industrial worker himself.

Legislation is necessary for the prevention of death, in any form in which it can be prematurely inflicted, and certainly this (i.e., the factory method) must be viewed as a most cruel mode of inflicting it.

It refused to throw children of 13 under the Juggernaut Car of capital for more than 8 hours a day, and the Act of 1833 came into full operation.

Threatened in their holiest interest, the rent of land, the Tories thundered with philanthropic indignation against the “nefarious practices” of their foes.

They felt themselves oppressed, but not exactly by the Factory Act.

It was a pro-slavery rebellion in miniature, carried on for over two years with a cynical recklessness, a terrorist energy all the cheaper because the rebel capitalist risked nothing except the skin of his “hands.”

The Lynx eye of Capital discovered that the Act of 1844 did not allow 5 hours’ work before mid-day without a pause of at least 30 minutes for refreshment, but prescribed nothing of the kind for work after mid-day.

In these tribunals, the masters sat in judgment on themselves.

During the 15 hours of the factory day, capital dragged in the labourer now for 30 minutes, now for an hour, and then pushed him out again, to drag him into the factory and to thrust him out afresh, hounding him hither and thither, in scattered shreds of time, without ever losing hold of him until the full 10 hours’ work was done.

The children were slaughtered out-and-out for the sake of their delicate fingers, as in Southern Russia the horned cattle for the sake of their hide and tallow.

The masters from whom the legal limitation and regulation had been wrung step by step after a civil war of half a century, themselves referred ostentatiously to the contrast with the branches of exploitation still 'free.'

The creation of a normal working day is, therefore, the product of a protracted civil war, more or less dissembled, between the capitalist class and the working-class.

The bargain concluded, it is discovered that he was no “free agent,” that the time for which he is free to sell his labour-power is the time for which he is forced to sell it, that in fact the vampire will not lose its hold on him “so long as there is a muscle, a nerve, a drop of blood to be exploited.”

If the free labourer allows himself an instant of rest, the base and petty management, which follows him with wary eyes, claims he is stealing from it.

In all European countries in which the conscription holds, since its introduction, the medium height of adult men, and generally their fitness for military service, has diminished.

The accused gentlemen affirm in lieu of taking an oath — as quakers they were too scrupulously religious to take an oath — that they had, in their great compassion for the unhappy children, allowed them four hours for sleep, but the obstinate children absolutely would not go to bed.

The cupidity of mill-owners whose cruelties in the pursuit of gain have hardly been exceeded by those perpetrated by the Spaniards on the conquest of America in the pursuit of gold.

How can that be expected from a man who has been at such work for 29 or 30 hours, exposed to the weather, and without rest.

Very many of us think that, while we work our own young women to death, using the scourge of starvation, instead of the crack of the whip, as the instrument of compulsion, we have scarcely a right to hound on fire and slaughter against families who were born slave-owners.

John Morris, age 14 — “Have heard say that God made the world, and that all the people was drownded but one, heard say that one was a little bird.”

Meanwhile, late by night, self-denying Mr. Glass-Capital, primed with port-wine, reels out of his club homeward droning out idiotically. “Britons never, never shall be slaves!”

These “holy ones,” so zealous in cute curanda, show their Christianity by the humility with which they bear the overwork, the privations, and the hunger of others.

The over-worked 'die off with strange rapidity; but the places of those who perish are instantly filled, and a frequent change of persons makes no alteration in the scene.'

Much as we deplore the evils before mentioned, it would not be possible to prevent them by any scheme of agreement between the manufacturers.

This same Scotch sycophant and fine talker, Macaulay, says: 'We hear to-day only of retrogression and see only progress.' What eyes, and especially what ears!

The supervision and enforcement of this law are, in a country where every mouse is under police administration, left to the good-will of the amis du commerce.

The money they had advanced to the plebeian debtor had been transformed via the means of subsistence into the flesh and blood of the debtor.

The same “high” Court of Justice discovered, during the American Civil War, a verbal ambiguity which exactly reversed the meaning of the law against the arming of pirate ships.

Plainly speaking, our lives are to us a burthen; and, while we are confined to the mills nearly two days a week more than the other operatives of the country, we feel like helots in the land.

The girls stand round the stove, which throws out a terrific heat, and dries the cambrics rapidly for the ironers.

Belgium, the paradise of Continental Liberalism, shows no trace of this movement. Even in the coal and metal mines labourers of both sexes, and all ages, are consumed, in perfect “freedom” at any period and through any length of time.

The worker knows now when that which he sells is ended, and when his own begins; and by possessing a sure foreknowledge of this, is enabled to prearrange his own minutes for his own purposes.

The mass of the surplus-value produced is therefore equal to the amount of the variable capital advanced, multiplied by the rate of surplus-value.

The absolute limit of the average working day – this being by nature always less than 24 hours – sets an absolute limit to the compensation of a reduction of variable capital by a higher rate of surplus-value.

In opposition to Spinoza, it believes that 'ignorance is a sufficient reason.'

Of course he can, like his labourer, take to work himself, participate directly in the process of production, but he is then only a hybrid between capitalist and labourer, a “small master.”

It is now no longer the labourer that employs the means of production, but the means of production that employ the labourer.

If he worked 12 hours before, and is limited to 10, then every 12 machines or spindles in his establishment shrink to 10, and should the works be disposed of, they will be valued only as 10.

The farmer cannot rely on his own labour, and if he does, I will maintain that he is a loser by it.

The prolongation of the surplus labour would correspond to a shortening of the necessary labour; or a portion of the labour-time previously consumed, in reality, for the labourer’s own benefit, would be converted into labour-time for the benefit of the capitalist.

The technical and social conditions of the process, and consequently the very mode of production must be revolutionised, before the productiveness of labour can be increased.

Whenever an individual capitalist cheapens shirts, for instance, by increasing the productiveness of labour he by no means necessarily aims at reducing the value of labour-power and shortening, pro tanto the necessary labour-time.

A scientific analysis of competition is not possible, before we have a conception of the inner nature of capital, just as the apparent motions of the heavenly bodies are not intelligible to any but him, who is acquainted with their real motions, motions which are not directly perceptible by the senses.

The exceptionally productive labour operates as intensified labour; it creates in equal periods of time greater values than average social labour of the same kind.

Hence there is immanent in capital an inclination and constant tendency, to heighten the productiveness of labour, in order to cheapen commodities, and by such cheapening to cheapen the labourer himself.

The object of all development of the productiveness of labour, within the limits of capitalist production, is to shorten that part of the working day, during which the workman must labour for his own benefit, and by that very shortening, to lengthen the other part of the day, during which he is at liberty to work gratis for the capitalist.

Machinery, it is true, cheapens the necessaries of life, but it also cheapens the labourer.

The workshop of the medieval master handicraftsman is simply enlarged.

Thus the laws of the production of value are only fully realised for the individual producer, when he produces as a capitalist, and employs a number of workmen together, whose labour, by its collective nature, is at once stamped as average social labour.

A portion of the instruments of labour acquires this social character before the labour-process itself does so.

The reason is, that a body of men working in concert has hands and eyes both before and behind, and is, to a certain degree, omnipresent.

When the labourer co-operates systematically with others, he strips off the fetters of his individuality, and develops the capabilities of his species.

That a capitalist should command on the field of production, is now as indispensable as that a general should command on the field of battle.

Hence the connexion existing between their various labours appears to them, ideally, in the shape of a preconceived plan of the capitalist, and practically in the shape of the authority of the same capitalist, in the shape of the powerful will of another, who subjects their activity to his aims.

We see mighty coral reefs rising from the depths of the ocean into islands and firm land, yet each individual depositor is puny, weak, and contemptible.

Each individual has no more torn himself off from the navel-string of his tribe or community, than each bee has freed itself from connexion with the hive.

As one man cannot, and ten men must strain to lift a ton of weight, yet 100 men can do it only by the strength of a finger of each of them.

The collective force of every man is minimal, but the union of these minimal forces forms a total force greater even than the sum of these same forces.

They showed that associations of workmen could manage shops, mills, and almost all forms of industry with success, and they immediately improved the condition of the men; but then they did not leave a clear place for masters.

The tailor, the locksmith, and the other artificers, being now exclusively occupied in carriage-making, each gradually loses, through want of practice, the ability to carry on, to its full extent, his old handicraft.

But whatever may have been its particular starting-point, its final form is invariably the same ‒ a productive mechanism whose parts are human beings.

A labourer who all his life performs one and the same simple operation, converts his whole body into the automatic, specialised implement of that operation.

On the other hand, constant labour of one uniform kind disturbs the intensity and flow of a man’s animal spirits, which find recreation and delight in mere change of activity.

Formerly the individual work of a Nuremberg artificer, the watch has been transformed into the social product of an immense number of detail labourers.

The collective labourer, with one set of his many hands armed with one kind of tools, draws the wire, with another set, armed with different tools, he, at the same time, straightens it, with another, he cuts it, with another, points it, and so on.

The division of labour, as carried out in Manufacture, not only simplifies and multiplies the qualitatively different parts of the social collective labourer, but also creates a fixed mathematical relation or ratio which regulates the quantitative extent of those parts.

The whole body is paralysed if but one of its members be wanting.

The habit of doing only one thing converts him into a never failing instrument, while his connexion with the whole mechanism compels him to work with the regularity of the parts of a machine.

In the beginning of civilisation, it is not private individuals but families, tribes, &c., that meet on an independent footing.

It may be said, that the whole economic history of society is summed up in the movement of this antithesis.

It is not the place, here, to go on to show how division of labour seizes upon, not only the economic, but every other sphere of society, and everywhere lays the foundation of that all engrossing system of specialising and sorting men, that development in a man of one single faculty at the expense of all other faculties.

The division of labour within the workshop implies the undisputed authority of the capitalist over men, that are but parts of a mechanism that belongs to him.

It is very characteristic that the enthusiastic apologists of the factory system have nothing more damning to urge against a general organisation of the labour of society, than that it would turn all society into one immense factory.

The structure of the economic elements of society remains untouched by the storm-clouds of the political sky.

The mechanism that is made up of numerous individual detail labourers belongs to the capitalist.

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.

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.

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.

By the infirmity of human nature, it happens that the more skilful the workman, the more self-willed and intractable he is apt to become.

Thus, knives that are adapted to cut all sorts of things, may, on the whole, be of one shape; but an implement destined to be used exclusively in one way must have a different shape for every different use.

In the best London houses scarcely a dozen watches are made alike in the course of a year.

They cannot well neglect their work; when they once begin, they must go on; they are just the same as parts of a machine.

The tribe was the primitive and spontaneously developed form of human association, on the basis of blood relationship, and that out of the first incipient loosening of the tribal bonds, the many and various forms of the family were afterwards developed.

The celebrated passage in the same chapter that begins with the words, 'Observe the accommodation of the most common artificer or day-labourer in a civilised and thriving country,' &c., is copied almost word for word from B. de Mandeville.

Each labourer produces only some part of a whole, and each part, having no value or utility in itself, there is nothing on which the labourer can seize, and say: It is my product, this I will keep to myself.

The man of knowledge and the productive labourer come to be widely divided from each other, and knowledge, instead of remaining the handmaid of labour... has almost everywhere arrayed itself against labour.

The more or less extensive application of division of labour depends on length of purse, not on greatness of genius.

For the workman must wait upon the work; it will not wait upon his leisure and allow itself to be done in a spare moment.

It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day’s toil of any human being.

He described it as a machine “to spin without fingers.”

The number of tools that a machine can bring into play simultaneously, is from the very first emancipated from the organic limits that hedge in the tools of a handicraftsman.

Of all the great motors handed down from the manufacturing period, horse-power is the worst, partly because a horse has a head of his own, partly because he is costly, and the extent to which he is applicable in factories is very restricted.

Not till the invention of Watt’s second and so-called double-acting steam-engine, was a prime mover found, that begot its own force by the consumption of coal and water, whose power was entirely under man’s control.

This subjective principle of the division of labour no longer exists in production by machinery.

A system of machinery, whether it reposes on the mere co-operation of similar machines, as in weaving, or on a combination of different machines, as in spinning, constitutes in itself a huge automaton, whenever it is driven by a self-acting prime mover.

Here we have, in the place of the isolated machine, a mechanical monster whose body fills whole factories, and whose demon power, at first veiled under the slow and measured motions of his giant limbs, at length breaks out into the fast and furious whirl of his countless working organs.

A radical change in the mode of production in one sphere of industry involves a similar change in other spheres.

Modern Industry had therefore itself to take in hand the machine, its characteristic instrument of production, and to construct machines by machines.

The tool of the shearing machine, which shears iron as easily as a tailor’s scissors cut cloth, is a monster pair of scissors; and the steam-hammer works with an ordinary hammer head, but of such a weight that not Thor himself could wield it.

From being a dwarf implement of the human organism, it expands and multiplies into the implement of a mechanism created by man.

In modern industry man succeeded for the first time in making the product of his past labour work on a large scale gratuitously, like the forces of Nature.

It is evident that whenever it costs as much labour to produce a machine as is saved by the employment of that machine, there is nothing but a transposition of labour.

Hence the invention now-a-days of machines in England that are employed only in North America; just as in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, machines were invented in Germany to be used only in Holland.

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.

The manufacturer, therefore, asks for children who look as if they were already 13 years old.

But since capital is by nature a leveller, since it exacts in every sphere of production equality in the conditions of the exploitation of labour, the limitation by law of children’s labour, in one branch of industry, becomes the cause of its limitation in others.

But the intellectual desolation artificially produced by converting immature human beings into mere machines for the fabrication of surplus-value, a state of mind clearly distinguishable from that natural ignorance which keeps the mind fallow without destroying its capacity for development, its natural fertility, this desolation finally compelled even the English Parliament to make elementary education a compulsory condition.

I was so struck with the ignorance of the master, that I said to him: ‘Pray, sir, can you read?’ His reply was: ‘Aye, summat!’ and as a justification of his right to grant certificates, he added: ‘At any rate, I am before my scholars.’

The 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.

In both cases, be the machine ever so young and full of life, its value is no longer determined by the labour actually materialised in it, but by the labour-time requisite to reproduce either it or the better machine.

“When a labourer,” said Mr. Ashworth, a cotton magnate, to Professor Nassau W. Senior, “lays down his spade, he renders useless, for that period, a capital worth eighteen- pence. When one of our people leaves the mill, he renders useless a capital that has cost £100,000.”

Hence, too, the economic paradox, that the most powerful instrument for shortening labour-time, becomes the most unfailing means for placing every moment of the labourer’s time and that of his family, at the disposal of the capitalist.

They did not, for example, comprehend that machinery is the surest means of lengthening the working day.

The denser hour of the ten hours’ working day contains more labour, i.e., expended labour-power than the more porous hour of the twelve hours’ working day.

Hence, within certain limits what is lost by shortening the duration is gained by the increasing tension of labour-power.

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.

It frequently happens that he finds he has gone too fast, that breakages and bad work more than counterbalance the increased speed, and that he is obliged to slacken his pace.

The identical steam-engines which in the days of the restricted speed of 220 feet per minute, yielded 50 horsepower, are now yielding upwards of 100.

Twelve hours’ work, as is evident from the facts adduced, is now compressed into less than 10 hours.

In these spacious halls the benignant power of steam summons around him his myriads of willing menials.

In handicrafts and manufacture, the workman makes use of a tool, in the factory, the machine makes use of him.

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.

The place of the slave-driver’s lash is taken by the overlooker’s book of penalties.

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.

So soon as the handling of this tool becomes the work of a machine, then, with the use-value, the exchange-value too, of the workman’s labour-power vanishes; the workman becomes unsaleable, like paper money thrown

The misery hardly finds a parallel in the history of commerce. The bones of the cotton-weavers are bleaching the plains of India.

The effect of substituting the self-acting mule for the common mule, is to discharge the greater part of the men spinners, and to retain adolescents and children.

It is the most powerful weapon for repressing strikes, those periodical revolts of the working-class against the autocracy of capital.

Violent revulsions of this nature display short-sighted man in the contemptible character of a self-tormentor.

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.

Crippled as they are by division of labour, these poor devils are worth so little outside their old trade, that they cannot find admission into any industries, except a few of inferior kind, that are over-supplied with underpaid workmen.

Since therefore machinery, considered alone, shortens the hours of labour, but, when in the service of capital, lengthens them; since in itself it lightens labour, but when employed by capital, heightens the intensity of labour.

The number of the men condemned to work in coal and metal mines increased enormously owing to the progress of the English factory system.

The rapid strides of cotton spinning, not only pushed on with tropical luxuriance the growth of cotton in the United States, and with it the African slave trade, but also made the breeding of slaves the chief business of the border slave-states.

What a splendid result of the capitalist exploitation of machinery!

Yes, Political Economy revels in the hideous theory, hideous to every “philanthropist” who believes in the eternal Nature-ordained necessity for capitalist production, that after a period of growth and transition, even its crowning success, the factory system based on machinery, grinds down more workpeople than on its first introduction it throws on the streets.

This first period, during which machinery conquers its field of action, is of decisive importance owing to the extraordinary profits that it helps to produce.

The life of modern industry becomes a series of periods of moderate activity, prosperity, over-production, crisis and stagnation.

The workpeople are thus continually both repelled and attracted, hustled from pillar to post, while, at the same time, constant changes take place in the sex, age, and skill of the levies.

The history of the cotton famine is too characteristic to dispense with dwelling upon it for a moment.

Experimenta in corpore vili, like those of anatomists on frogs, were formally made.

After 1833, the extension of the Asiatic markets is enforced by “destruction of the human race” (the wholesale extinction of Indian hand-loom weavers).

Besides the factory operatives, the manufacturing workmen and the handicraftsman, whom it concentrates in large masses at one spot, and directly commands, capital also sets in motion, by means, of invisible threads, another army.

Owing to the excessive labour of their workpeople, both adult and non-adult, certain London houses where newspapers and books are printed, have got the ill-omened name of “slaughterhouses.”

You might as well, said one of the better kind to a chaplain of Southallfield, try to raise and improve the devil as a brickie, sir!

The life of myriads of workmen and workwomen is now uselessly tortured and shortened by the never-ending physical suffering that their mere occupation begets.

If a question be asked them, they never raise their eyes from their work from fear of losing a single moment.

The children themselves call the elementary schools, “natural schools,” to distinguish them from these blood-sucking institutions, in which they are kept at work simply to get through the task, generally 30 yards daily, prescribed by their half-starved mothers.

The wretched half-starved parents think of nothing but getting as much as possible out of their children.

It was in fact by the cheapness of the human sweat and the human blood, which were converted into commodities, that the markets were constantly being extended.

The overproduction of sewing- machines themselves, causes their producers, in bad want of a sale, to let them out for so much a week, thus crushing by their deadly competition the small owners of machines.

Finally, the substitution of the steam-engine for man gives in this, as in all similar revolutions, the finishing blow.

No poison kills vermin with more certainty than the Factory Act removes such everlasting barriers.

Mirabeau’s “Impossible! ne me dites jamais ce bête de mot!” is particularly applicable to modern technology.

The so-called domestic workers, whose employment is at the best irregular, are entirely dependent for their raw material and their orders on the caprice of the capitalist, who, in this industry, is not hampered by any regard for depreciation of his buildings and machinery, and risks nothing by a stoppage of work, but the skin of the worker himself.

In many cases a quarter of the body is torn from the trunk, and either involves death, or a future of wretched incapacity and suffering.

They thus, in fact, declare that consumption and other lung diseases among the workpeople are necessary conditions to the existence of capital.

They perform this weary task, in London especially, for 14, 15, and 16 hours at a stretch, during several days in the week, and frequently for 36 hours, with only 2 hours’ rest for meals and sleep.

Modern industry rent the veil that concealed from men their own social process of production, and that turned the various, spontaneously divided branches of production into so many riddles, not only to outsiders, but even to the initiated.

Modern Industry, indeed, compels society, under penalty of death, to replace the detail-worker of to-day, grappled by life-long repetition of one and the same trivial operation, and thus reduced to the mere fragment of a man, by the fully developed individual.

However terrible and disgusting the dissolution, under the capitalist system, of the old family ties may appear, nevertheless, modern industry... creates a new economic foundation for a higher form of the family.

As it was, he always felt restless at night, when he had closed his place, lest others should be working later than him and getting away his orders.

What strikes us, then, in the English legislation of 1867, is, on the one hand, the necessity imposed on the parliament of the ruling classes, of adopting in principle measures so extraordinary, and on so great a scale, against the excesses of capitalistic exploitation; and on the other hand, the hesitation, the repugnance, and the bad faith, with which it lent itself to the task of carrying those measures into practice.

The mode of examining the witnesses reminds one of the cross-examination of witnesses in English courts of justice, where the advocate tries, by means of impudent, unexpected, equivocal and involved questions, put without connexion, to intimidate, surprise, and confound the witness.

He is imprisoned there just the same as if he was in a cell of a gaol.

There is a peculiarity of dress? Yes ... it is rather a man’s dress, and I believe in some cases, it drowns all sense of decency.

The coal proprietor appoints certain gentlemen to take the oversight of the workings, and it is their policy, in order to receive approbation, to place things on the most economical basis they can.

To tell the truth there are many men who are timid on that point; there have been cases of men being sacrificed and losing their employment in consequence of applying to the inspector.

'I believe that in many cases they would act very partially indeed, and that it ought not to be in their hands to do so, where men’s lives are at stake.'

By maturing the material conditions, and the combination on a social scale of the processes of production, it matures the contradictions and antagonisms of the capitalist form of production, and thereby provides, along with the elements for the formation of a new society, the forces for exploding the old one.

Capitalist production, by collecting the population in great centres, and causing an ever-increasing preponderance of town population, on the one hand concentrates the historical motive power of society; on the other hand, it disturbs the circulation of matter between man and the soil.

Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth—the soil and the labourer.

The air makes bondage, was the cry in Germany, at the same time that the wind was making Holland free.

The steam-engine is the parent of manufacturing towns.

It is only after considerable development of the science of mechanics, and accumulated practical experience, that the form of a machine becomes settled entirely in accordance with mechanical principles, and emancipated from the traditional form of the tool that gave rise to it.

Its introduction went at once to perfect all machinery, to cheapen it, and to stimulate invention and improvement.

The science of others is as much annexed by capital as the labour of others.

This portion of value which is added by the machinery, decreases both absolutely and relatively, when the machinery does away with horses and other animals that are employed as mere moving forces.

we shall be able to employ them in the same manner as the latter to all uses to which they are adapted, and thus as it were make ourselves the masters and possessors of nature

The half-time system ‘stimulated’ the invention of the piecing machine.

An American revolution and a universal crisis, in order that the working girls, who spin for the whole world, might learn to sew!

Thus are the virtues, the peculiar virtues of the female character to be perverted to her injury – thus all that is most dutiful and tender in her nature is made a means of her bondage and suffering.

In these stormy, go-ahead times, therefore, the tulle manufacturers soon extended the working day, by means of double sets of hands, from the original 8 hours to 24.

Deo has commanded the work of the girls to be done by the Nymphs, and now they skip lightly over the wheels, so that the shaken axles revolve with their spokes and pull round the load of the revolving stones.

At the present time (1871) he has to mind with the help of 5 piecers 2,200 spindles, and produces not less than seven times as much yarn as in 1841.

Most of the accidents from them happen to little children, from their creeping under the mules to sweep the floor whilst the mules are in motion.

This labour of surveillance, which might perhaps serve as a useful exercise for the mind, if it did not go on too long, destroys both the mind and the body in the long run, through excessive application.

The despotic bell calls him from his bed, calls him from breakfast and dinner.

The reports of the Ch. Empl. Com. (1863- 1866), give cases where the worker not only receives no wages, but becomes, by means of his labour, and of the penal regulations, the debtor to boot, of his worthy master.

Wheels, rollers, spindles and shuttles are now propelled at increased and increasing rates; fingers must be quicker and defter in their movements to take up the broken thread, for, if placed with hesitation or carelessness, they are sacrificed.

I have heard some mill-owners speak with inexcusable levity of some of the accidents; such, for instance, as the loss of a finger being a trifling matter.

Thus degrading pauperism or expatriation, is the benefit which the industrious receive from the introduction of machinery, to be reduced from the respectable and in some degree independent mechanic, to the cringing wretch who lives on the debasing bread of charity.

The relation of master and man in the blown-flint bottle trades amounts to a chronic strike.

The young servant girls in the houses of the London lower middle class are in common parlance called “slaveys.”

‘Under the old system I employed 63 persons; after the introduction of improved machinery I reduced my hands to 33, and lately, in consequence of new and extensive alterations, I have been in a position to reduce those 33 to 13’.

And yet, though wages sink lower and lower, profits appear, with each alteration in the scale of wages, to increase.

Our cotton mills may be brought to a stand by the periodical stagnations of trade, which, under present arrangements, are as inevitable as death itself.

The weekly report of deaths by the Registrar-General dated 26th Feb., 1864, contains 5 cases of death from starvation.

In Birmingham ... an enormous amount of time is lost ... idling part of the time, slaving the rest.

I wish my own children could have some work as well as play to give variety to their schooling.

All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify.

In consequence of thus finding out that I am fit to any sort of work, I feel less of a mollusk and more of a man.

The 'hopelessly bewildering tangle of contradictory enactments' which English legislation called into life by means of the mutually conflicting Factory Acts, the Factory Acts Extension Act and the Workshops’ Act, finally became intolerable.

You divide the people into two hostile camps of clownish boors and emasculated dwarfs.

It is, however, to be regretted that he ventures on such haphazard assertions as the following.

As in the natural body head and hand wait upon each other, so the labour-process unites the labour of the hand with that of the head. Later on they part company and even become deadly foes.

By the side of independent producers who carry on their handicrafts and agriculture in the traditional old-fashioned way, there stands the usurer or the merchant, with his usurer’s capital or merchant’s capital, feeding on them like a parasite.

There is no natural obstacle absolutely preventing one man from disburdening himself of the labour requisite for his own existence, and burdening another with it, any more, for instance, than unconquerable natural obstacle prevent one man from eating the flesh of another.

Where nature is too lavish, she “keeps him in hand, like a child in leading-strings.”

There, then, people go into the forests, and cut bread for themselves, just as with us they cut fire-wood.

Of course it is very true, that if a bird’s nest did not last longer than the time it takes in building, birds would have to do without nests.

On the level plain, simple mounds look like hills; and the imbecile flatness of the present bourgeoisie is to be measured by the altitude of its great intellects.

One of the material bases of the power of the state over the small disconnected producing organisms in India, was the regulation of the water supply.

A working day of given length always creates the same amount of value, no matter how the productiveness of labour, and, with it, the mass of the product, and the price of each single commodity produced, may vary.

It is impossible for them to rise or fall simultaneously.

In this way it is possible with an increasing productiveness of labour, for the price of labour-power to keep on falling, and yet this fall to be accompanied by a constant growth in the mass of the labourer's means of subsistence.

He therefore confounds together the laws of the rate of surplus-value and the laws of the rate of profit.

This occurs whenever the rise in the price of labour-power does not compensate for its increased wear and tear.

But beyond this point the wear and tear increases in geometrical progression, and every condition suitable for the normal reproduction and functioning of labour-power is suppressed.

This was the period in which the right to prolong the hours of labour to an outrageous extent was established; the period that was especially characterised by an accelerated accumulation of capital here, by pauperism there.

In capitalist society spare time is acquired for one class by converting the whole life-time of the masses into labour time.

The amount of labour which a man had undergone in the course of 24 hours might be approximately arrived at by an examination of the chemical changes which had taken place in his body, changed forms in matter indicating the anterior exercise of dynamic force.

In order that the surplus-labour may absorb the whole day (i.e., an average day of any week or year), the necessary labour must sink to zero.

The secret of the self-expansion of capital resolves itself into having the disposal of a definite quantity of other people’s unpaid labour.

How then is the value, e.g., of a 12 hour working- day to be determined? By the 12 working- hours contained in a working day of 12 hours, which is an absurd tautology.

In the expression “value of labour,” the idea of value is not only completely obliterated, but actually reversed.

What economists therefore call value of labour, is in fact the value of labour-power, as it exists in the personality of the labourer, which is as different from its function, labour, as a machine is from the work it performs.

The wage form thus extinguishes every trace of the division of the working day into necessary labour and surplus labour, into paid and unpaid labour.

That this same labour is, on the other hand, the universal value-creating element, and thus possesses a property by which it differs from all other commodities, is beyond the cognizance of the ordinary mind.

Hence, he never comes to see that, if such a thing as the value of labour really existed, and he really paid this value, no capital would exist, his money would not be turned into capital.

Labor is created the moment it is brought to market; nay, it is brought to market before it is created.

It should have compared the daily cost of such a Negro with that of the free workman in the East-end of London.

The rise of the nominal daily or weekly wages may therefore be accompanied by a price of labour that remains stationary or falls.

The capitalist can now wring from the labour a certain quantity of surplus labour without allowing him the labour-time necessary for his own subsistence.

The low price of labour during the so-called normal time compels the labourer to work during the better paid over-time, if he wishes to obtain a sufficient wage at all.

The unpaid labour of the men was made ... the source whereby the competition was carried on, and continues so to this day.

The capitalist does not know that the normal price of labour also includes a definite quantity of unpaid labour, and that this very unpaid labour is the normal source of his gain.

The rate of payment for overtime (in lace-making) is so small, from ½ d. and ¾ d. to 2d. per hour, that it stands in painful contrast to the amount of injury produced to the health and stamina of the workpeople.

The masters tempt them by extra pay and supper, which they eat in neighboring public houses. The great debauchery thus produced among these “young immortals” is compensated by the fact that among the rest many Bibles and religious books are bound by them.

Wages by the piece are nothing else than a converted form of wages by time, just as wages by time are a converted form of the value or price of labour-power.

The form of piece wages is just as irrational as that of time- wages.

The exploitation of the labourer by capital is here effected through the exploitation of the labourer by the labourer.

Really hard work during 12 or 14 hours of the day, or for any longer time, is too much for any human being.

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.

It is when work passes through several hands, each of which is to take its share of profits, while only the last does the work, that the pay which reaches the workwoman is miserably disproportioned.

Because they are paid by piece wages, it is said that no risk is incurred, since any loss of time will be charged against the unemployed.

The demanding higher wages, because labour is abbreviated, is in other words the endeavor to establish a duty on mechanical improvements.

In England wages are virtually lower to the capitalist, though higher to the operative than on the Continent of Europe.

On this Russian soil, so fruitful of all infamies, the old horrors of the early days of English factories are in full swing.

A step further and he will, perhaps, discover that the one evil in capitalist production is capital itself.

For it is not the wages that is given to the labourer per day that constitutes the real price of labour, although it is its apparent price.

On the other hand, we treat the capitalist producer as owner of the entire surplus-value, or, better perhaps, as the representative of all the sharers with him in the booty.

It is his labour of last week, or of last year, that pays for his labour-power this week.

The transaction is veiled by the commodity form of the product and the money form of the commodity.

When a person gets through all his property, by taking upon himself debts equal to the value of that property, it is clear that his property represents nothing but the sum total of his debts.

The product of the labourer is incessantly converted, not only into commodities, but into capital, into value that sucks up the value-creating power.

The consumption of food by a beast of burden is none the less a necessary factor in the process of production, because the beast enjoys what it eats.

The Roman slave was held by fetters: the wage labourer is bound to his owner by invisible threads.

Potter, the chosen mouthpiece of the manufacturers, distinguishes two sorts of “machinery,” each of which belongs to the capitalist, and of which one stands in his factory, the other at night-time and on Sundays is housed outside the factory, in cottages.

In reality, the labourer belongs to capital before he has sold himself to capital.

Wealth, like labour, and by means of labour, bears fruit every year, but this fruit can be destroyed every year without making the rich man any poorer thereby.

The bull-like bellow of the landed proprietors at the opening of Parliament, in 1866, showed that a man can worship the cow Sabala without being a Hindu, and can change himself into an ox without being a Jupiter.

It is curious to observe that the very dung of the hind and bondsman is the perquisite of the calculating lord ... and the lord will allow no privy but his own to exist in the neighbourhood.

£2,000 is £2,000. We can neither see nor smell in this sum of money a trace of surplus-value.

The circle in which simple reproduction moves, alters its form, and, to use Sismondi’s expression, changes into a spiral.

There is not one single atom of its value that does not owe its existence to unpaid labour.

The transaction is for all that only the old dodge of every conqueror who buys commodities from the conquered with the money he has robbed them of.

The separation of property from labour has become the necessary consequence of a law that apparently originated in their identity.

It is indeed notorious that the sphere of labour is not the only one in which primogeniture works miracles.

However long a series of periodical reproductions and preceding accumulations the capital functioning today may have passed through, it always preserves its original virginity.

Exclusion of money from circulation would also exclude absolutely its self-expansion as capital, while accumulation of a hoard in the shape of commodities would be sheer tomfoolery.

It is evident that the whole gist of this argument lies in the words “and so on,” which send us from pillar to post.

Fanatically bent on making value expand itself, he ruthlessly forces the human race to produce for production’s sake.

But along with this growth, there is at the same time developed in his breast, a Faustian conflict between the passion for accumulation, and the desire for enjoyment.

It substitutes for an economic category, a sycophantic phrase – voilà tout.

Enough, that the world still jogs on, solely through the self-chastisement of this modern penitent of Vishnu, the capitalist.

The constant tendency of capital is to force the cost of labour back towards this zero.

The squires of Norfolk had dined, says Mr. Burke, when they fixed the rate of wages; the squires of Berks evidently thought the labourers ought not to do so.

Thanks to the elasticity of labour-power, the domain of accumulation has extended without any previous enlargement of constant capital.

The value of the additional capital, therefore, remaining the same or even diminishing, accelerated accumulation still takes place.

It teaches at the same time how to throw the excrements of the processes of production and consumption back again into the circle of the process of reproduction, and thus, without any previous outlay of capital, creates new matter for capital.

This natural power of labour takes the appearance of an intrinsic property of capital, in which it is incorporated, just as the productive forces of social labour take the appearance of inherent properties of capital.

The practical agents of capitalistic production and their pettifogging ideologists are as unable to think of the means of production as separate from the antagonistic social mask they wear today, as a slave-owner to think of the worker himself as distinct from his character as a slave.

That is to say, we first add together the individual wages actually paid, and then we affirm that the sum thus obtained, forms the total value of the “labour fund” determined and vouchsafed to us by God and Nature.

Capital, with compound interest on every portion of capital saved, is so all engrossing that all the wealth in the world from which income is derived, has long ago become the interest on capital.

Usury is a great huge monster, like a werewolf, who lays waste all, more than any Cacus, Gerion or Antus.

For Cacus means the villain that is a pious usurer, and steals, robs, eats everything. And will not own that he has done it, and thinks no one will find him out, because the oxen, drawn backwards into his den, make it seem, from their foot-prints, that they have been let out.

The wished-for goal of English capital is no longer Continental wages but Chinese.

The examination of 34 specimens of opium, purchased of as many different chemists in London, showed that 31 were adulterated with poppy heads, wheat-flour, gum, clay, sand, &c.

The “difficulté” — it exists for him, not for Ricardo — that Say means to clear up is this: Why does not the exchange-value of the use values increase, when their quantity increases in consequence of increased productive power of labour?

If all those propositions appear paradoxical to you, look at the things they express, and I venture to believe that they will then appear very simple and very rational.

With the driest naïveté he takes the modern shopkeeper, especially the English shopkeeper, as the normal man.

The hardships and the earnings, instead of being directly proportional, as in any just arrangements of society they would be, are generally in an inverse ratio to one another.

I call the value composition of capital, in so far as it is determined by its technical composition and mirrors the changes of the latter, the organic composition of capital.

The only thing then that can render the labouring man industrious, is a moderate quantity of money, for as too little will, according as his temper is, either dispirit or make him desperate, so too much will make him insolent and lazy.

It is not the possession of land, or of money, but the command of labour which distinguishes the opulent from the labouring part of the community.

A rise in the price of labour, as a consequence of accumulation of capital, only means, in fact, that the length and weight of the golden chain the wage worker has already forged for himself, allow of a relaxation of the tension of it.

The mechanism of the process of capitalist production removes the very obstacles that it temporarily creates.

As, in religion, man is governed by the products of his own brain, so in capitalistic production, he is governed by the products of his own hand.

This change in the technical composition of capital, this growth in the mass of means of production, as compared with the mass of the labour power that vivifies them, is reflected again in its value composition.

Every individual capital is a larger or smaller concentration of means of production, with a corresponding command over a larger or smaller labour-army.

Capital grows in one place to a huge mass in a single hand, because it has in another place been lost by many.

The world would still be without railways if it had had to wait until accumulation had got a few individual capitals far enough to be adequate for the construction of a railway.

But in time the old capital also reaches the moment of renewal from top to toe, when it sheds its skin and is reborn like the others in a perfected technical form.

The labouring population therefore produces, along with the accumulation of capital produced by it, the means by which it itself is made relatively superfluous, is turned into a relative surplus population; and it does this to an always increasing extent.

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.

The mass of social wealth, overflowing with the advance of accumulation, and transformable into additional capital, thrusts itself frantically into old branches of production, whose market suddenly expands, or into newly formed branches.

It requires for its free play an industrial reserve army independent of these natural limits.

The condemnation of one part of the working class to enforced idleness by the overwork of the other part, and the converse, becomes a means of enriching the individual capitalists.