and 20 per cent. eaten up, the accumulated capital will be £2,400 or £1,200, according as the total surplus-value has amounted to £3,000 or £1,500. Hence all the circumstances that determine the mass of surplus-value, operate to determine the magnitude of the accumulation. We sum them up once again, but only in so far as they afford new points of view in regard to accumulation.
It will be remembered that the rate of surplus-value depends, in the first place, on the degree of exploitation of labour-power. Political economy values this fact so highly, that it occasionally identifies the acceleration of accumulation due to increased productiveness of labour, with its acceleration but to increased exploitation of the labourer.[1] In the chapters on the production of surplus-value it was constantly presupposed that wages are at least equal to the value of labour-power. Forcible reduction of wages below this value plays, however, in practice too important a part, for us not to pause upon it for a moment. It, in fact, transforms, within certain limits, the labourer’s necessary consumption-fund into a fund for the accumulation of capital.
“Wages,” says John Stuart Mill, “have no productive power; they are the price of productive-power. Wages do not contribute, along with labour, to the production of commodities, no more than the price of tools contributes along with the tools themselves. If labour could be had without purchase, waged might be dispensed with.”[2] But if the labourers could live on air they could not be bought at any price. The zero of their cost is therefore a limit in a mathematical sense, always beyond reach, although we can always
- ↑ “Ricardo says: ‘In different stages of society the accumulation of capital or of the means of employing” (i.e., exploiting) “labour is more or less rapid, and must in all cases depend on the productive powers of labour. The productive powers of labour are generally greatest where there is an abundance of fertile land.’ If, in the first sentence, the productive powers of labour mean the smallness of that aliquot part of any produce that goes to those whose manual labor produced it, the sentence is nearly identical, because the remaining aliquot part is the fund whence capital can, if the owner pleases, be accumulated. But then this does not generally happen, where there is most fertile land.” (“Observations on certain verbal disputes, &c.,” pp. 74, 75.)
- ↑ J. Stuart Mill: “Essays on some unsettled questions of Political Economy Lond, 1849,” p. 90.
