capitalist, the landlord and others. According to this, the surplus-labour of the English agricultural labourer is to his necessary labour as 3:1, which gives a rate of exploitation of 300%.
The favourite method of treating the working-day as constant in magnitude became, through the use of the formulæ II., a fixed usage, because in them surplus-labour is always compared with a working-day of given length. The same holds good when the repartition of the value produced is exclusively kept in sight. The working-day that has already been realised in a given value, must necessarily be a day of given length.
The habit of representing surplus-value and value of labour-power as fractions of the value created—a habit that originates in the capitalist mode of production itself, and whose import will hereafter be disclosed—conceals the very transaction that characterises capital, namely the exchange of variable capital for living labour-power, and the consequent exclusion of the labourer from the product. Instead of the real fact, we have the false semblance of an association, in which labourer and capitalist divide the product in proportion to the different elements which they respectively contribute towards its formation.[1]
Moreover, the formulæ II, can at any time be reconverted into formulæ I. If, for instance, we have Surplus-labour of 6 hoursWorking-day of 12 hours the necessary labour-time being 12 hours less the surplus-labour of 6 hours, we get the following result,
Surplus-labour of 6 hoursNecessary-labour of 6 hours=100100
There is a third formulæ which I have occasionally already anticipated; it is
III. Surplus-valueValue of labour-power=Surplus-labourNecessary labour=Unpaid labourPaid labour
After the investigations we have given above, it is no longer possible to be misled, by the formula Unpaid labourPaid labour into con-
- ↑ All well-developed forms of capitalist production being forms of co-operation, nothing is, of course, easier, than to make abstraction from their antagonistic char-
