Capital by Karl Marx

Author:Karl Marx
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780141920603
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2013-04-08T04:00:00+00:00

5. THE SO-CALLED LABOUR FUND

It has been shown in the course of this inquiry that capital is not a fixed magnitude, but a part of social wealth which is elastic, and constantly fluctuates with the division of surplus-value into revenue and additional capital. It has been seen further that, even with a given magnitude of functioning capital, the labour-power, science and land (which means, economically speaking, all the objects of labour furnished by nature without human intervention) incorporated in it form elastic powers of capital, allowing it, within certain limits, a field of action independent of its own magnitude. In this inquiry we have ignored all relations arising from the process of circulation, which may produce very different degrees of efficiency in the same mass of capital. And since we presupposed the limits set by capitalist production, i.e. we presupposed the social process of production in a form developed by purely spontaneous growth, we disregarded any more rational combination which could be effected directly and in a planned way with the means of production and the labour-power at present available. Classical political economy has always liked to conceive social capital as a fixed magnitude of a fixed degree of efficiency. But this prejudice was first established as a dogma by the arc-philistine, Jeremy Bentham, that soberly pedantic and heavy-footed oracle of the ‘common sense’ of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie.50 Bentham is among philosophers what Martin Tupper* is among poets. Both could only have been manufactured in England.51 This dogma in fact renders the commonest phenomena of the production process, for instance its sudden expansions and contractions, and even accumulation itself, absolutely incomprehensible.52 It was used by Bentham himself, as well as by Malthus, James Mill, MacCulloch, etc., for apologetic purposes, and in particular so as to represent one part of capital, namely variable capital, or that part convertible into labour-power, as being of fixed size. Variable capital in its material existence, i.e. the mass of the means of subsistence it represents for the worker, or the so-called labour fund, was turned by this fable into a separate part of social wealth, confined by natural chains and unable to cross the boundary to the other parts. To set in motion the part of social wealth which is to function as constant capital, or, to express it in a material form, as means of production, a definite mass of living labour is required. This mass is given by technology. But the number of workers required to put this mass of labour-power in a fluid state is not given, for it changes with the degree of exploitation of the individual labour-power. Nor is the price of this labour-power given, but only its minimum limit, which is moreover very elastic. The facts on which the dogma is based are these: on the one hand, the worker has no right to interfere in the division of social wealth into means of enjoyment for the non-worker and means of production. On the other hand, it is only

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