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

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

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

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

Marx, Capital I, page 715.

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

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

Marx, Capital I, page 716.

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

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

Marx, Capital I, page 729.

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

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

Marx, Capital I, pages 729–730.

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

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

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