talist class. Though the latter with a portion of that tribute purchases the additional labour-power even at its full price, so that equivalent is exchanged for equivalent, yet the transaction is for all that only the old dodge of every conquerer who buys commodities from the conquered with the money he has robbed them of.
If the additional capital employs the person who produced it, this producer must not only continue to augment the value of the original capital, but must buy back the fruits of his previous labour with more lahour than they cost. When viewed as a transaction between the capitalist class and the working class, it makes no difference that additional labourers are employed by means of the unpaid labour of the previously employed labourers. The capitalist may even convert the additional capital into a machine that throws the producers of that capital out of work, and that replaces them by a few children. In every case the working class creates by the sur plus-labour of one year the capital destined to employ additional labour in the following year.[1] And this is what is called: creating capital out of capital.
The accumulation of the first additional capital of £2000 presupposes a value of £10,000 belonging to the capitalist by virtue of his “primitive labour,” and advanced hy him. The second additional capital of £400 presupposes, on the contrary, only the previous accumulation of the £2000, of which the £400 is the surplus-value capitalised. 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.
In so far as the surplus-value, of which the additional capital, No. 1, consists, is the result of the purchase of labour-power with part of the original capital, a purchase that conformed to the laws of the exchange of commodities, and that, from a legal stand-point, presupposes nothing beyond the free disposal, on the part of the labourer, of his own capacities, and
- ↑ “Labour creates capital before capital employs labour.” E. G. Wakefield, England and America, Lond., 1838, Vol, II., p. 110.
