Part Six – Wages

Chapter Seventeen: The Conversion of the Value of Labor Power and Its Price into Wages

Part 6 and 7

Nasser Paydar

Rereading Marx’s Capital, Volume 1, Chapters 17 to 25

In bourgeois society the wages of the worker appear as the price of labour. Capital is inherently distorting and inverting, but the imposition of wages as the price of labour!! is the greatest lie and the foundation of all its other falsifications and distortions. What is directly presented to the capitalist or money-holder in the commodity market is not labour but the worker. What the worker sells is not labour, but his labour-power. When work really begins, the worker is not the owner of his labour to sell. Labor is the essence and measure of value within life, but it has no value in itself. What economics calls the value of labour is actually the value of labour power that exists in the personality of the worker. Labor is the actualization of labour power, and its difference from labour power is like the difference between the work of a machine and the machine itself. But why does the value and price of labour power turn into its distorted form, namely wages? This is the same criminal black trick that emanates from the nature of capital and becomes the thread and thread of the consciousness of the capitalist, the bourgeois economist, and other intellectual representatives of this system, so that they, in turn, make this the dominant consciousness of the working masses. Inject the workers as if they had really, really sold their labour and received its price!! As if all the labour had been paid and there was no unpaid labour!! In pre-capitalist forms of production, the serf knew how much labour he had done for the landlord. Because the time and place of this labour were completely separate from the work he did for himself. He could see openly and nakedly which work he had done under compulsion and under the pressure of the lord’s bayonet and which part of his suffering and toil and his daily labour belonged to him. The peasant did not need special knowledge, talent, or intelligence to understand the cruelty and criminality of feudal rent. He/she realized with his multiple senses that he himself/herself had killed, watered, done the work of the land, and finished the harvest, and therefore he considered the payment of rent to the feudal lords as a great crime committed against him/she. In the system of slavery, the situation was even more stark. The slave even considered the work he/she did for himself, the part of the daily work that was spent on his livelihood, as work for the cruel slave owner. He/she thought that he had done all the work for the slave owner.

In the inhuman system of capitalism, the subject is fundamentally inverted, distorted, inverted and deceptive. Here, work without any wages appears and is induced to be work with wages!!, there, in previous modes of production, the relations of ownership cover up the work that slaves did for themselves, in capitalism the vast volume of completely free work of the wage slave is denied in the most vicious and criminal way. The exchange of labour and capital is considered and takes place like the purchase and sale of any other commodity. The buyer pays a certain amount of money, and the seller delivers something other than money. What apparently happens is this: (I surrender because you surrender, I surrender so that you do, I do because you surrender, and I do so that you do) As far as the worker is concerned, he/she interprets the deceptive appearance of this transaction as if, in fact, the daily value of her 8-hour work is the same as the wage she receives! Now, if this wage increases or decreases due to changes in the price of subsistence necessities or under the influence of fluctuations in the supply and demand for labour, he/she still considers this changed form of wage to be the total daily value of his/her labour! This is a perception and understanding that capital has instilled in him and has shaped his consciousness with it. From the capitalist’s perspective, the matter also boils down to this: the more labour he/she does, the less money he gets, or the greater the difference between the price of labour and the value he gains by consuming the commodity of labour.  

The wage is a very terrible deception masking the brutal exploitation of the worker by capital, the most terrible deception of capital to camouflage the catastrophic separation of the worker from work and the process of determining the fate of his work, production and life. The phenomenon of wages throws the worker into the abyss of this terrifying petrification, freezing and metamorphosis, as if the top and bottom of his struggle must be summed up in the ever-increasing price of labour power!!, as if being a wage slave is the destiny of his/he

 life! Fossilization in wages causes the worker to focus his current class war on the axis of the abolition of wage labour, the abolition of the relationship of buying and selling labour power, the abolition of classes and the state, the complete abolition of capitalism, instead of mirrors, to lock himself/herself in the increase and decrease of wages. This is the greatest crime of capital against the worker, against humanity, against human life, future and consciousness. This is the same crime that both right and left forms of reformism have played the role of a crutch in the hands of the bourgeoisie in imposing it on the world labour movement. The workers of the world must replace the struggle for wages with the struggle for complete collective and council control over the fate of their work, production and life.

Chapter 18: Daily wage labour

Wages have different forms, and the longer capitalism lasts, the more numerous these forms become!! In addition to the dark world of deceptive sorcery that we mentioned above, wages are also hung up on this sinister lie and trick that it is the truth, or at least the real price of the worker’s labour power. Capital even fills the claim of this claim with a huge pile of deceptions and tricks. Labor power is the only asset, the only means of livelihood and life, and the only saleable commodity for the worker. When the worker sells his/her labour power under the pressure of the criminal economic coercion of capital, he/she hands over an inseparable part of his/her physical and intellectual body to the scavenging capitalist. A part that in its true earthly sense never returns and is not reproduced. This is the appearance of the story that the worker reproduces the lost labour power with his/her wages, by receiving the price of his/her basic subsistence needs, but the extent of the truth of this statement is only to the extent that he can still work for the capitalist and produce capital and profit. This is the perception of the owner of capital who has paid the price of reproducing labour power, but from the worker’s perspective, this is not and cannot be the case. For him/her, the reproduction of his/her labour power must be accompanied and homogenized by the guarantee of reliable and optimal reproduction of his/her entire life. Do not misunderstand. Here we are not talking about the humane, radical, conscious and anti-capitalist expectations of the worker. If this were the case, the complete abolition of capitalism would be the bottom of desires and the starting point for the emergence of real expectations. We are talking about capitalism and the spontaneous will of the worker under the rubble of economic coercion and other atrocities of this system. In this dark hell and in calculating the price of labour power, if this price is to be really paid, the reproduction of the worker’s life must be guaranteed. Payment of wages for leisure time, complete provision of health, medicine, treatment, wellness, annual leave, education to the highest levels, a pension that is adequate in all respects for retirement, special care during old age or disability, recreation and other aspects of well-being, all of which must be considered inseparable appendages to the cost of this reproduction. The price of labour power must be the basis for calculating all of these data. Otherwise, and to the extent that these facilities are removed in exchange for value, it is the real price of labour that is the target of attack and slaughter. The price of labour for the worker is this, even in this hell of filth and horror of capitalism, and therefore the mere receipt of the price of reproducing the labour force that he has placed at the disposal of the capitalist in a certain period of time is in no way the real price of his labour force. The hourly wage is a weapon of capital for slaughtering the price of the labour force of the worker. The capitalists use this weapon in various ways. Including:

1. Hourly wage is one of the worst forms of wage payment. The basis for determining hourly wage is the calculation of the daily wage of the worker divided by the total number of hours of work in a day. But the capitalist, as soon as he finds an opportunity, starts to extend the daily work. In this regard, he reduces the price of one hour of work to the maximum possible degree. If the hourly wage of the worker was, for example, 0,38 Pounds before, after the extension, he reduces it to 0,286 Pounds or even less, depending on the length of time that has been added. In today’s capitalist world, hourly wages are an important strategy for capitalists to avoid paying a significant portion of the same slaughtered wages. A portion that capital owners confiscate so that, in case of coercion and heavy pressure from workers’ struggles, they can pay it as a gift of capital!! under the name of this or that insurance. The capitalists do not return this portion of wages to workers who work by the hour.
2. Competition among workers is a terrible weapon that capital has historically fired into the heart of the working class to uncontrollably lower the time value of labour. The more the number of unemployed people in society increases, the darker the employment prospects of workers become. Under the pressure of the economic coercion of capital, they will be forced to sell their labour power cheaper and more quasi-free. A scourge that has always and everywhere entangled the world working class in its web and has prevented it from achieving the minimum price of labour power.
3. By constantly increasing the productivity of labour, by continually reducing its variable part in comparison with its fixed part, and by producing maximum output with the least number of workers, capital reduces its need for labour wherever it can. This makes the competition for jobs among the working masses even more intense, more crushing, and more disastrous, and at the same time opens the hands of the capitalists to further and more monstrous reductions in hourly wages.
4. Leaving aside the competition among workers, even the competition of capitalists over the distribution of surplus value is their weapon for the massacre of the worker’s time wage. A part of the capitalist class, which is unable to compete with its class partners and opponents due to the smaller volume of capital or the totality of the components constituting the conditions for the valorisation of capital, sees the way to achieve greater and greater surplus value in prolonging the working day as much as possible or in exhausting the workers more and more during their work. This in turn causes the hourly or daily wages of the mass of workers to fall sharply.

Chapter Nineteen: Wage Work

Wage labour is nothing more than a modified form of hourly or piecework wages, but it suggests that the use value sold by the worker is not the function of living labour power, but something separate from him, namely the labour embodied in the product. In this regard, it suggests that the price of labour power is determined not by the time formula of the daily value of labour power divided by the working hours of a day but based on the skill of the producer. Wage is one of the most effective weapons of capital to reduce the price of labour power and increase the capitalist’s profit. Why is this so? We will only mention a few points below.

1. Like time wages, wages lack any rational criteria. The economic power of capital determines the sole basis of both forms of wages. Piece wages do not express any direct value relationship. The work expended by the worker is measured only by the number of pieces he produces. In time wages, the work expended was measured by the time it was performed, but here only the quantity of the product produced in a given period is the criterion for calculation.
2. In the wage system, the quality of work is judged by the capitalist through inspection of the product, and the capitalist can exert maximum pressure on the worker to increase the quality of the products as much as possible. This process makes the worker’s surplus labour burden even heavier to the detriment of his/her necessary labour.
3. The wage provides an exact measure of the intensity of labour. The labour-time required to produce a given unit of a commodity is the only socially necessary labour-time, and the price paid for it is the price of the labour-time required to produce that unit. For example, the time required to sew and prepare a coat is estimated at two hours, and this becomes the capitalist’s weapon, along with all other weapons, to slaughter the value of the labour-power of the worker. He determines the rate of wages by reference to this level of productivity of labour, deprives workers who do not have this level of productivity of labour of labour, and reduces the value of their labour-power as far as he can.
4. Here the wage form itself is the police of the labour process. The worker is forced to use all his strength to further improve the quality of work, produce more mass in a shorter time, and do everything necessary to increase profits. This exempts the capitalist from the need for spies, watchmen, and control agents over the worker. More importantly, it establishes and consolidates the foundation for capital’s exploitation of the domestic labour of working women and children, the fear-mongering exploitation of this section of the working class, and the intensification of the exploitation of the entire class. It allows the capitalists to make the greatest savings in building workshops, transportation costs, water and electricity, workers’ travel, and other production costs, and in this way increase the volume of profits.
5. According to the characteristics mentioned in the previous lines, the commission is the foundation of another system of explosive intensification of the exploitation of labour. This system has two basic forms. The first form is based on the intervention of brokers and parasitic elements as an intermediary between the capitalist and the worker. Brokers, who do not cost the owner of capital, provide their profit by slaughtering the workers’ wages, exempting the capitalist from bearing some of the costs and finally removing the risk of workers’ protest from capital. This is the same model that was once called the system of drudgery in England. The second form of the system under discussion is the capitalist’s recourse to contracting with some capable workers in various work centres, especially small workshops, mines, etc. He/she enters into a deal with these people to produce the desired volume of pieces of commodities, and in this way makes some workers the cause of intensifying the exploitation of his fellow workers.
6. The wage system grossly reinforces and intensifies the process of the worker’s dissolution, freezing and metamorphosis in the process of capital’s valorisation and his/her service to the ever-increasing profit of the capitalists. It throws the worker into the abyss of believing that by further exhausting himself/herself, increasing the intensity of his work and producing more and more, he/she will achieve a better life!! An idea that is deeply illusory and false. He/she only destroys himself faster in order to make capital fatter and fatter.
7. In time wages, except for exceptions, a single wage is paid for a certain type of work, but in wage labour, on the one hand, the value of the working period is measured by a certain amount of product, for example, two hours for a coat, and on the other hand, the daily wage is a function of individual differences between workers. Each worker receives a different wage from another worker depending on the degree of skill, ability, and type of these. This in turn makes competition between workers more crushing and in this regard lowers average wages.
8. Considering all the above points, commission is the most suitable method of payment for the owners of capital. This is precisely why, throughout the history of capitalism and all periods of this dark history, it has always been used by capitalists on the widest level.  

Chapter 20: Differences in wages in different societies

If wages are nothing more than the price of the necessities of life necessary to reproduce the labour power required by capital in a given period of time, then the basis for the difference in the wages of workers in different countries of the world must also be sought in the difference in the price of these necessities, but this statement does not tell the whole story. The necessities of life of the worker in different periods and different societies do not have a single pattern. The variety of needs is not the same, nor is the cost of providing them the same. Above all, it is the balance of power between the working class and the capitalist class that has the final say and determines the real framework of needs and the price of labour. The average intensity of labour varies in different countries; in each society, labour with a lower-than-average intensity is considered to be of poor quality, and the time required to produce a given commodity is more than the socially necessary time. At the international level, as far as wage differences are concerned, the following points are important.

1 – A country’s more productive labour is considered higher-intensity labour as long as the country has not reduced the price of its goods to the level of real value under the pressure of competition in the world market.

1. As the capitalist mode of production develops in a country, productivity and average labour intensity rise above the international level. Accordingly, different quantities of the same goods produced in different societies with equal labour time have unequal international value values. Different value values ​​expressed in different prices or monetary amounts have different international values. In this regard, firstly, the relative value of the currency of a country that is at a more advanced level will be lower than that of a society that is not at this level of development. Secondly, the nominal wage or price of labour in the first country will be higher than in the second country. Whether this ruling also applies to real wages, that is, the necessities of life and means of living provided to the worker, cannot be confirmed in any way.
2. – Political economy has used all its power to suggest that as the productivity of labour in a society increases, wages also grow by the same amount!! This claim is false and false in every respect, but its problem is by no means limited to its being a lie. By putting forward this lie, bourgeois economists are obscuring the fundamental facts regarding the ever-increasing intensification of the exploitation of the world working class by international capital. This issue requires a precise and radical Marxian analysis. First of all, the level of wages has nothing to do with the degree of productivity of labour. Nowhere in the world, in any period of history, has any bourgeoisie or any capitalist state spread out the book and the calculator of labour productivity to determine the level of wages of workers, or has it not taken the path of increasing wages because of the flood of its profits! If workers here and there have succeeded in obtaining a riyal increase in wages, they have imposed this increase on the owners of capital and the state solely by the power of struggle. If the workers of one country, despite less struggle, receive higher wages than their fellow workers in another country, then the real root of the matter must be sought not in greater productivity of labour, but in the special calculations of the bourgeoisie regarding the present and future dangers of the labour movement.
3. In comparing two countries with different levels of capitalist development, Marx states that the relative value of money in a more advanced society is lower than in a less advanced society. The higher average productivity of labour causes the worker in the first country to produce more product than the worker in the second country in a given time, the value of a commodity is determined by the socially necessary labour crystallized in it. Price is the monetary expression of value, and money is nothing more than a means of expressing value. This is Marx’s point of departure. Another important point is Marx’s recognition of these components in the historical conditions of the day. As time has passed, the global expansion of the relationship of buying and selling labour has become more explosive, the capitalist production cycle of different societies has merged, the social capital of countries has seen the pressure of the global capitalist division of labour weigh more heavily on its own valorisation process. The capitalist compliance of countries with the laws of competition, the price of production, the dynamics of determining the general rate of profit, and finally, the way in which the surplus values ​​resulting from the exploitation of the world’s working class are distributed among the different sectors of global capital have undergone major changes. Conditions have arisen in which a huge share of the socially necessary labour time of one part of the world is absorbed by the capital of another part. An event that prepares the capitalist class of the first sector to organize the most fearsome attacks against the price of labour, the level of living, and every breath of protest of the working masses. At the same time, it allows the bourgeoisie of the second sector to make some deceptive tactical retreats against the wave of struggles of the working masses. It also gives the workers of these countries the opportunity to further exploit their struggles to impose their subsistence and welfare demands.

The above factors also affect the relative value of money in more and less advanced capitalist societies. Let us take a simple example. Consider two separate societies with two different levels of labour productivity. Both societies produce one million passenger cars each year. The production of cars in the more productive society takes 10 million hours of socially necessary labour time, while in the second society it takes 30 million hours. If all these products were sold at their real value, the annual output of the automobile industry in the first country would be, for example, $20 billion and in the second country $60 billion. But the owners of automobile factories enter the market. They compete. The production price of automobiles is determined under the pressure of competition. This price is such that the automobile industry of the less developed society loses, for example, the equivalent of one and a half million hours of socially necessary labour performed by the workers in its field, and the automobile industry of the more developed society absorbs the same amount of socially necessary labour time. In this way, the value of the products of the first country increases from 20 billion to 50 billion dollars, and the second society decreases from 60 billion to 30 billion. This event also affects the value of the money of these societies.

Part Seven – The Process of Capital Accumulation

Chapter Twenty-One: Simple Reproduction

The production process in any social form must be continuously reproduced, and the various stages of this reproduction must be repeated. No society can continue production unless it transforms part of its products into new means of production. This society, assuming that all conditions remain constant, can only maintain its existing wealth when it replaces all the worn-out means of production, consisting of tools of labour, raw materials and auxiliary materials, with new ones. In this way, there is no choice but to provide a certain share of the products of production in the form of tools and means of labour every year and join the production process. In capitalism, just as production is essentially the process of producing surplus value, reproduction is also essentially the reproduction of capital as self-increasing value. Now, if the capitalist considers this surplus value as income or the fruit of his/hers advanced capital, if he/she spends it only on the necessities of life, if he/she does this in all the periods of the return of his/hers capital, and finally if all other conditions remain constant, then, with the sum of all these components, we will witness the simple reproduction of capital.

The worker receives wages when his/her labour power has been consumed by capital. He/she has both created the value of his/her labour power and produced surplus value. Even in this simple reproduction of capitalism, the consumption of his labour power by capital has become the only eternal reserve of a fund which continually creates and reproduces the price of his/her own necessities of life and the comfort, livelihood, pleasure, capital and wealth of the capitalist. If he receives the price of his labour power, it is only because the product of his/her labour is continually and incessantly moving further and further away from him/she. Let us consider a capital of one million dollars, which exploits a number of workers and generates $200,000 in surplus value for its owner every year. We are talking about simple reproduction, and we must assume that all this surplus value is consumed by the capitalist. Five years pass, and the capitalist has spent the equivalent of his/her entire capital on subsistence, comfort, savings, and the like. But his/hers $1 million remains alive and well in his possession, and it generates $200,000 in new value every year. What has happened? The answer is clear. Where he/she got his capital from in the first place is not our concern for the moment. The fundamental point is that in this simple reproduction, what he now has after 5 rounds of capital turnover is not even a cent of his/hers own. His/her entire capital is the surplus value produced by the workers and appropriated by him/her. The capitalist has sucked the lifeblood of the worker like a leech. The worker has become further and further removed from the product of his labour, and the product of his labour has become the capital of the capitalist’s leeches and bloodsuckers. Let us suppose that the capitalist’s initial capital of one million dollars was indeed his/her own God-given property! After several rounds of capital reversal, he/she has swallowed and enjoyed the entire “divine bounty”! From then on, everything he/she has, his/her entire capital, is the surplus value created by the workers without any reduction or reduction. The worker has been separated from his work by the economic power of capital, and the product of his work has become capital. He/she has been transformed into a value that sucks the value-creating power of the worker to the last drop, capitalizes it, makes a powerful force alien to the worker, makes the creature the creator and the creator the slave, the wretched and the humiliated product of his work. We said above that in simple reproduction, the worker both creates the value of his labour power and produces the entire livelihood, welfare, living conditions, and wealth of the capitalist. Now, if instead of a capitalist and a worker, we consider two classes of capitalists and workers, or the entire capitalist production process on a large and social scale, the story will be fundamentally different. In this situation, we will see that the capitalist, in the process of transforming a part of his capital into variable capital or the price of labour power, aims at and hits two targets with one arrow. He/she not only appropriates the surplus value resulting from the exploitation of the worker, but he also even makes his necessary value or wages a mechanism for increasing his profit. Wages are transformed into the necessities of life and the means of life, so that they become muscle, nerve, bone, blood, flesh and brain. All these become the fibre and tissue of labour power, which are the indispensable requirements of the process of capital’s valorisation. Thus, the personal consumption of the working class is nothing more than the production and reproduction of the most vital and necessary means of production for capital. This consumption is practically a momentary and procedural part of the process of reproduction of capital. Just as the lubrication of a machine is a minute part of the process of reproduction of capital. The fact that the worker apparently eats, breathes and consumes the means of subsistence at will does not change the essence of the matter. The beast of burden also certainly enjoys eating, but his master does not feed him for the enjoyment of it, he feeds him only to take the burden off him/her. The survival and reproduction of the masses of the working class to the extent required by capital, and only to the extent that this class survives, works, and is exploited, is the most vital condition for the valorisation and perpetuation of capital. Both the capitalist and his ideologist, the economist, consider as productive only that part of the worker’s personal consumption which is necessary for his survival and continued exploitation. If the worker earns more than this, he is unproductive from the point of view of capital. Any increase in the worker’s wages or personal consumption which is not accompanied by a greater consumption of his labour power by capital and the production of greater profits is a loss of surplus labour and profit for capital. Capital sees the working class as an integral part and a variable part of itself. It looks at it only from this perspective and as a means of self-expansion and self-expansion. Capitalist production is the production of capital and the reproduction of the process of self-expansion of capital. The worker has no other significance in the ideology, thought, and understanding of capital, apart from this role. With the emergence and establishment of the capitalist mode of production, the encounter between the capitalist and the worker as buyers and sellers of the commodity of labour power is no longer accidental. It is the heartbeat and pulse of this mode of production. The mode of production that reproduces the vast majority of humans, the working class, in successive generations, merely as a part of capital, a means of capital appreciation, a mechanism for capital self-expansion, separates the producers of capital more deeply and more violently from their work and eliminates them from existence. Here, even before he sells himself, the worker is the property of capital and the capitalist. He has no choice but to sell himself; this sale is the condition for his survival. His economic belonging to capital is both realized and disguised by three repeated and alternating actions: selling himself, changing the face of the master, and fluctuations in the price of labour power in the market. The capitalist production process is a process in which not only commodities, not only surplus value, are produced, but the capital relation itself, that is, the existence of the capitalist on the one hand and the wage labourer on the other, is also produced and reproduced.   

Chapter Twenty-Two: The Conversion of Surplus Value into Capital

1. Capitalist production on an expanding scale, the transformation of ownership of commodity production into capitalist ownership, the conversion of surplus value into accumulated capital, is called. Let’s go back a hundred years ago, the years when capitalism began to grow in Iran and look at a capital of 10,000 Tomans. A capitalist owns a clothing factory, spends 9,000 tomans on buying a sewing machine, scissors, fabric, thread, iron or fixed capital, and allocates the remaining 1,000 tomans to workers’ wages or variable capital. The workers work, and after a period of several months, the owner of the company, by calculating the cost of production, the selling price of the products, and all the accounting details, finds that the initial 10,000 tomans of advanced capital has increased to 16,000 tomans. The workers have received 1,000 tomans, surrendered 5,000 tomans of surplus value to the capitalist, and have suffered a rate of exploitation of 600 percent. The capitalist, happy and intoxicated by the acquisition of 5,000 tomans of surplus value, spends his 1,000 tomans on his life, well-being, and pleasures, and adds another 4,000 tomans to the previous capital of 10,000 tomans. From this additional capital, for example, he allocates 3,600 tomans to the fixed part and 400 tomans to the variable part or to hire a new worker. This is repeated several times, and the result is in reality that:

First: The capitalist has used up many times what he had advanced for his own consumption, and whatever exists in the form of workshops, machinery, means of production, raw materials, or in a word, capital, is only the product of the labour of the workers who work there. During this period, the capitalist has appropriated the product of the labour or surplus labour of a number of workers and has built up his own capital without paying a single dinar for it.

Second: The continuous buying and selling of labour power is the external process of the affair; its real content is the continuous appropriation of the objectified labour of the worker by capital. This is also the essence and essence of capitalist property. Property here has no other meaning than the appropriation of the greatest part of the product of labour or the surplus labour of the working class. For the capitalist, this ownership is simply the appropriation of the product of the labour of others, and for the worker its only meaning is that under the control of these relations he cannot in any way own the product of his labour; on the contrary, his separation from labour and the product of his labour becomes more profound, more terrible, more terrifying, and more catastrophic from moment to moment.

Third: The political economy of the bourgeoisie, all capitalists, all statesmen and all intellectual, political and ideological representatives of capital, see this relationship, this relationship of buying and selling labour power, this external appearance of the criminal, brutal and coercive process of appropriation of labour and the product of labour by capital and capitalists as the foundation of right, freedom, civilization, democracy, free choice, human rights and human values!!! The content of all freedom, rights, vote, civilization, welfare, free civil society of the bourgeoisie is exactly this and it is precisely the establishment of this hell of filth, blood, killing and brutality that has constituted the highest level of expectation and expectation of all the so-called democratic and “liberal” movements of the twentieth century and the current century in the world. The workers who have been and are being deceived by these tricks and have made their class the vulgar and vulgar pawns of these movements, must finally come to their senses and learn radical lessons for the current class struggle from reviewing this extremely dark record.

2 – The inversion of political economy regarding mass reproduction

Political economy calls accumulation a glorious national mission!! The root of mysticism!! or the caution of bourgeois thinkers against luxury!!, apparently lies here. They believed that palace building, hoarding or magnificent luxuries should be avoided, and the greatest share of surplus value should be allocated to additional capital. In describing the “national” glory of accumulation!!, economists vulgarly insisted on this inversion as if the additional capital were spent at once and entirely on wages and the employment of new productive workers!! A matter that both Smith and Ricardo insisted on. They did not even consider that the capitalist does not allocate surplus value only to the variable part of capital or the wages of new workers. He increases both the fixed and variable parts of his capital in proportion to the composition of the day.

3 – How to divide surplus value into capital and income

The capitalist is completely independent of whether he is the owner of a factory, bank, store, transportation and any other enterprise, or a statesman, economist, philosopher and intellectual representative of capital, in any case he is nothing other than the embodiment of capital in the form of “humanity”. The brain, consciousness, feeling, emotion, social values, will, culture and everything in it is the production of profit and the self-expansion of capital by separating humans from their work and the product of their work and completely and completely removing them from any interference in the fate of their work, production and life. The capitalist is such a being and, by virtue of his class identity, is anti-human and an obstacle to the life, rights, freedom or free development of humans. Let us leave aside the fact that any level of development of the capitalist mode of production requires that the capital advanced be continually increased. The compulsion of competition forces the individual capitalist to obey the inherent laws of capitalism which appear as external, oppressive laws. He can only compete when he continuously expands his capital, for which he has no choice but to accumulate more. The capitalist even wants his own existence for accumulation!! What view did the capitalists have of the division of surplus value between personal consumption and additional capital, and what path did they take? This is a subject that has not been the same in different periods of the development of this mode of production. In the early stages, when the volume of accumulation was still limited, labour productivity was low, techniques, expertise, and tools were low, and profits remained in narrow streams, the slogan of contentment and avoidance of luxury in Favor of increasing the accumulation of the mind and intelligence of every capitalist locked itself in. With the passage of time, the expansion of capitalism, the growth of labour productivity, the rise of the surplus value rate, the overflow of profits, the galactic advance of capital, and the saturation of the world with capital concentration, the need to reduce personal consumption to increase accumulation as far as the capitalist was concerned became a painful tale of history. Nevertheless, accumulation and accumulation again, the inadequacy of accumulation, the need for accumulation became more rebellious, and in a word, the increase without any control of capital became more rebellious and thunderous as an inherent and characteristic feature of the capitalist mode of production. What could not have happened otherwise is the shameful irony of history that the capitalist class and bourgeois thinkers, economists and ideologists call this galactic accumulation of capital on their part the same asceticism, the mystical human contentment of their class to fulfil the “national” mission!! They boast that instead of spending the huge flood of profits on pleasure, enjoyment and prosperity, they are capitalizing and channelling it into the sphere of accumulation and, truly, they are doing this to serve humanity!!! They are maintaining national industry!!! To bring prosperity to the ancestral homeland!! A disgusting filth full of insolence, stench and abomination that has complemented the brutal slaughter of human consciousness with the slaughter of his flesh, skin, blood and bones. For centuries, the world working class has been fighting against these filths, against the material basis of these inversions, against the existential foundation of capital accumulation, against the economic, political and social system based on this accumulation. It has seen its every sip of livelihood, freedom, rights and survival tied to the storminess of this war. It has declared that the rial, the rial of the existing capital in the world is the direct product of its work, it has shouted that this product of work, instead of becoming a source of livelihood, prosperity, freedom, needlessness, power and free growth, has become the basis of poverty, hunger, brutal intensification of exploitation, subordination and humiliation. But the owners and rulers of capital continue to beat the drum of the same filth.

4 – Factors independent of the division of surplus value into income and capital that play a role in determining the amount of accumulation.

If the ratio of the division of surplus value into income and capital is given, it is clear that the volume of accumulation will be a function of the absolute amount of surplus value. If 80 percent of the surplus value produced becomes additional capital, then with the increase in the volume of surplus values, the share of accumulation will also increase by the same amount. The direct meaning of this statement is that all the factors that influence the increase in the volume of surplus values ​​also play their own role in the development of accumulation, and finally, to examine the ups and downs of the dynamics of accumulation, we must go to these factors. So, let’s explain them.

First – The intensity of exploitation of labour: The rate of surplus value is a function of the intensity of exploitation. Political economy insists on making the effect of labour productivity and the pressure of the intensity of exploitation on the rate of accumulation appear the same and hides their essential differences. In other words, it tries to pretend that increased accumulation has nothing to do with the brutal intensification of labour exploitation but is the result of greater labour productivity!! An insistence that is deeply misleading. It is true that the worker’s wages are the price of his subsistence and “well-being” necessities, but the basis of labour is capital, which has driven the cost of labour towards absolute zero. How far it succeeds in this transition is a matter related to the resistance and struggle power of the working class. It is the essence of capitalist production that sees the worker’s livelihood basket as a reserve fund for accumulation and wage war with all its might to slaughter this basket in Favor of increasing the volume of accumulation. The difference in wage levels in different countries and regions of the world is very clear evidence of capital’s firm determination to reduce the price of labour to zero and to explosively intensify the exploitation of workers with the aim of increasing the rate of accumulation. If workers in one corner of the world earn more wages compared to their peers, it is absolutely not because the capitalist class has recognized the right to food, clothing, shelter or medicine, treatment and education for workers!! On the contrary, it is only because the current generation or previous generations of the working masses have been able to impose higher wages on capital and its state. Wherever this has not been the case, capital has used every possible weapon, whether it is a rabid dictatorship, fascism, nationalism, theocracy or democracy, to suppress the struggles of workers, to massacre the value of their labour and their means of subsistence, and to increase the intensity of exploitation in order to meet the needs of the rate of accumulation.

Second – The degree of productivity of social labour: An increase in the degree of productivity of social labour leads to an increase in the total product and, consequently, to an increase in the value and surplus value contained in it. While this increase increases the rate of surplus value, it also reduces the price of labour power or the price of the subsistence goods required to reproduce this power, and in this regard, it drastically increases the share of surplus value that is to be spent on accumulation.

Third – The growth of the difference between capital in use and capital employed: We know that fixed capital is composed of two parts. The fixed part, such as machinery, buildings, installations and tools that are put into use in each production cycle or each round of capital turnover, enters the production process, but only a small portion of them depreciates and is consumed in the production process, the rest remaining intact and healthy. The second part or the circulating part of fixed capital is composed of raw materials, auxiliary materials and the like, which are completely consumed and form the basis of new products. The focus of our discussion here, in examining the factors affecting the rate of accumulation, is precisely on the first part or the fixed part of capital. This part, like all capital, is the result of the labour and exploitation of the working class. The confiscated and plundered product of labour, which enters the production process in the largest volume and value, is not consumed, but it plays an effective role in the production of new products. For the capitalist mode of production and the capitalist class, this sector is very similar to the abundant natural resources and facilities such as rivers, waterfalls, and mines, which are used by the owners of capital without any cost or price, and they do not spend a single riyal in return for this use. The fundamental and identity difference between the fixed part of capital and these huge resources and reserves of nature is that the former is the direct product of the labour and exploitation of the working masses. The main point here is the enormous impact that this part of capital has on the development of the more it accumulates. Capital that enters the production process but is not consumed in this process, while not producing any new riyal of value, but its use by living labour has the greatest role in the productivity of labour and increasing the product, in raising the result of labour and the production of the worker. It causes the increasing growth of surplus values ​​​​and makes the share of capital accumulation in this surplus value much heavier and larger.

5 –The vulgarity of the theory the payment work:

             Capital is the surplus labour of the worker and grows and expands through the increasing appropriation of this surplus labour. As we have seen, it strives for the speed, extent, acceleration, and intensity of this growth through all possible channels, ways, and levers. It increases the intensity of exploitation of labour power, encroaches on the standard of living and the price of labour power, makes the burden of surplus labour and surplus value astonishingly heavy by increasing the productivity of social labour, uses all natural resources and reserves of nature at no cost in the service of producing ever more massive surplus value, makes the part of capital that enters the production process but is not consumed ever larger, and in this way, by increasing the productivity of labour, makes the river of surplus values ​​more turbulent. In all these cases and with the help of all these levers, capital makes accumulation more and more gigantic. All this is the nature of capital, yet political economy and its twisted and distorted representatives try to portray social capital in general and its variable part in particular as fixed and static phenomena!! They pretend that the variable part of capital is a fixed quantity!! It is a separate part of social wealth!! It is a certain amount of labour!!, a handout!! or a labour fund!! that has its own four walls, the worker meets the needs of capital and receives his wages in return for meeting this need, this is the essence of the words of Cordell economists from “Bentham” and “Malthus” to “Mill” and McCulloch. The extent of their petrification, senselessness, stupidity and class ignorance is also such that they are willing to close their eyes to all the naked facts of the world in order to prove their vulgar claims. We have explained that the variable part of capital is the only source of the production of the total capital and the reproduction of the process of its self-expansion. The ratio of this part or the price of the labour power of the working class to the constant part of capital is constantly changing. As the productivity of social labour increases, the weight of this part becomes relatively less. The absolute value of this part is also constantly fluctuating. The basis of capital’s work is based on its reduction to zero in Favor of the accumulation of wealth. To what extent the price of labour power remains immune from the bourgeoisie’s appropriation is a question whose answer is determined by the strength of the struggle of the working masses. It is the nature of capital to separate the worker from any kind of interference in determining the fate of his work, production, and life. Accordingly, it does not grant any worker any right to determine what share of the mountains of his work and production should be allocated to his life and what should happen to the rest. Finally, contrary to the very vulgar claim of economists, capital is not only not a constant quantity but is also increasing in a riotous manner. The source of this increase is also simply the unpaid labour of the working masses.

Chapter Twenty-Three: The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation

1 – Capital composition remains the same, accumulation requires more labour

The composition of capital refers to the ratio between its fixed and variable components. In this case, we are initially faced with two situations.

First: The ratio of the price of raw materials and means of production to the price of labour power. Second: The ratio of the volume of means of production to the number of workers who convert these means into products. Marx called the first ratio the value composition and the second the technical composition. He called the value composition of capital, insofar as it results from its technical composition, the organic composition of capital, and wherever they speak of the composition of capital, this is what is meant. Different capitals that are advanced in a given sphere of production or in society as a whole have different compositions. The average organic composition of the capitals of a field is called the composition of that field, and the average of all the capitals of society is called the organic composition of social capital.

The surplus value that is converted into additional capital is divided between the fixed and variable components of capital. Let us assume that this division is made on the basis of the existing organic composition of capital and that the accumulation process continues in the same way, for example, if the present composition of capital is 80% and 20%, the newly added capital is also advanced in the same proportion. In such a situation, all other things being equal, we will see the capitalists needing more labour after different periods of capital turnover. An event that also leads to a demand for wage increases by workers. The last point is a fact that has historically been a source of fear for the owners of capital and, even more so, for the political economy magnates of the bourgeoisie. The dimensions of the apprehension of Smith, Ricardo and the likes of the effects of the development of accumulation on the workers’ demand for higher wages were such that they even went as far as the abyss of delusion. For example, they claimed that all the additional capital would become the wages of the working class!! Their predecessors had also been greedy enough in this regard and had warned enough. Verses and hadiths with the meaning that “poverty of honour” was not exclusive to the Prophet of Islam. The scholars of the bourgeois political economy have also always, in fear of the increase in workers’ wages, started to reveal similar verses, “Poverty is the source of effort and the increase in wealth”!!, “Workers should not be full because they lose the love of work”!! or a host of other evil nonsense are enough to be heard in their economic works. What the “thinkers” of economics and their modern descendants have not understood and do not understand at all is that capitalism itself, in its very existence, is a volcano of poverty and the source of the greatest tsunamis of hunger for billions of workers in the world. Their concern for the workers’ well-being, like all their thoughts, theories, knowledge and scientific discoveries, is excessive, disgusting and hateful.

Wages, by their very nature, imply that the worker, with each riyal he receives, delivers vast quantities of work to the capitalist without any remuneration. Needless to say, an increase in wages is ultimately, at best and at most, a slight reduction in the mountain of surplus work without any remuneration. This reduction cannot pose any danger to the existence of capitalism. The rise in wages in the wake of the expansion of accumulation, and of course assuming that this expansion is accompanied by capital’s need for more labour, leads to one of two things: 1. The price of labour continues to rise, because the increase in wages does not hinder the development of accumulation. 2. The price of labour increases, which reduces the incentive to profit and slows down the accumulation process, but the reason for this decline, namely the ratio between capital and the labour force it exploits, also changes. A change that indicates a decrease in capital’s need for labour and prevents the level of wages from rising. The result is that the capitalist production process, with its internal mechanisms in this specific area, marginalizes the obstacles created in the way of accumulation. In the first case, it is not the absolute or relative decline in the growth of the labour force, or the decrease in the working population that has caused the increase in capital, but rather the growth of capital that has made the exploited labour force insufficient. In the second case, it is not the absolute or relative increase in the labour force and the increase in the working population that has caused the decrease in accumulation. On the contrary, it is the reduction of capital that has made the existing number of workers more than necessary. In other words, it is the absolute fluctuations in capital accumulation that cause the relative fluctuations in the mass of labour. The latter does not cause the former; in mathematical terms, it is the rate of accumulation that plays the role of the variable, and the wage rate is a function of it. What is important and worth emphasizing here is that the relationship between capital, accumulation, and wage rates is ultimately nothing more than the relationship between unpaid labour that is transformed into capital and wage labour that is exploited to launch and make this unpaid labour profitable (additional capital). Here, the relationship between two different quantities, namely capital on the one hand and the number of workers on the other, is really, and at its most basic level, a conversation between the relationship between the unpaid labour of workers and their wage labour. Unpaid labour that becomes the capital of the capitalist class and wage labour that is exploited by this unpaid labour or capital. If in the world of religion man is dominated by the creations of his brain, in the capitalist mode of production he is dominated by the product of his own hands.

2 – The variable component of capital is decreasing relatively.

The points made above were about the conditions in which the technical composition of capital remained constant. But the capitalist mode of production, having established its general foundations, entered a phase in which the continuous development of the productivity of social labour determined the most powerful lever of accumulation. Until then, natural conditions such as the fertility of the soil or the special skill of the workers had played the most important role in increasing the volume or quality of the product, but now it was the productivity of labour that played the main role. The degree of productivity of labour was expressed in the relative quantity of means of production that the worker converted into products in a given time, with a given intensity of labour. The higher the productivity of social labour, the greater the volume of means of production that he converted into products. These means played two different roles. Some were a condition for the increase in the productivity of labour, but others were its result. For example, with the entry of modern industrial machinery into the cycle of capital valorisation, the volume of raw materials converted into products per unit time increased dramatically. The increase in these materials was the result of the upward trend in the productivity of social labour, but the machines themselves, chemical fertilizers, and the automation of the production cycle played the role of a prerequisite for the increase in the degree of productivity of labour. The important point is that the growth of the means of production relative to labour power, in any case and independently of its condition or result, is evidence of an increase in the productivity of social labour. This growth, or the change in the technical composition of capital, usually also changes the value composition of capital. Let us consider a capital of 100 pounds. 60 pounds of it constitute the fixed component and 40 pounds of it constitute the variable component. With the increase in the productivity of social labour, for example, 90 pounds are spent on machinery and raw materials, and only 10 pounds are allocated to the purchase of labour. The technical composition of capital has changed because, compared to the past, much larger quantities of means of production are consumed by a smaller number of workers and converted into products. At the same time, the value composition of capital has risen from 60% fixed and 40% variable to 90% fixed and 10% variable. Let us remember that with the increase in labour productivity, the amount of means of production that the worker converts into products over a given period of time increases, but the value of these means increases less in relation to the worker’s wages than their volume or quantity increases in relation to the number of workers. An important reason for this is the gradual decline in the price of the aforementioned means.

The relative decrease of the variable component of capital in comparison to its fixed component is inherent in capitalist production. This relative decrease is in no way in conflict with the absolute increase of the variable component of capital. Let us return to the same example above. The fixed capital of 60 pounds increases by 10 times and becomes 600 pounds. The variable capital of 40 pounds, which was previously the wages of 10 workers, increases by 50 percent and reaches 60 pounds. In the same vein, the number of workers increases from 10 to 12. Here, the fixed capital has increased by 10 times, but the variable capital has only increased by 50%, and the composition of the total capital, which was 60% fixed and 40% variable, has changed to 90% fixed and 10% variable. With the emergence and growth of the capitalist mode of production, each accumulation of capital became a means for further accumulation. The growth of individual capitals causes the growth of social capital and vice versa. Many capitals are separated from the mother tree like offshoots and are advanced separately. This fragmentation, tearing or state of flight of individual capitals from each other, in other words, the repulsive force that capitals exert on each other, is complemented by a force of attraction between them.

In the process of accumulation and production, individual capitals inevitably compete with each other. To compete, they require a larger volume of reserves, greater productivity of labour, and the expansion of the scope of accumulation. This need makes moving towards each other and merging into each other necessary and compelling. This merging is not a simple concentration of the means of production in the hands of a capitalist and his oppressive rule over a number of workers, it is the concentration of previously formed capitals that are being valued. It indicates the dispossession and disappearance of the individual independence of the owners of individual capitals and the transformation of numerous small capitals into a few large capitals. Its difference from what existed before is that it involves a change in the way the current social capital is distributed. The extent of its sphere of influence is not determined by the absolute growth of accumulation. Rather, capital becomes increasingly concentrated and concentrated in one place and in the hands of a single capitalist, for the obvious reason that it has been removed from the hands of many. A process that allows capital to constantly change its composition, to raise the productivity of labour, and to pave the way for its economic and social dominance in history.

As capitalist production expands, the process of this concentration and concentration on the one hand and the competition of capitals with each other on the other becomes more acute and extensive. The basic weapon of competition is the reduction of production costs and the cheapening of goods. This, assuming that other conditions remain constant, requires an increase in the productivity of social labour. Increased productivity, in turn, depends on more mass production. Competition with this definition and characteristic makes the swallowing of small capitals by large capitals an absolutely inevitable matter. Let us not forget that with the further development of the capitalist mode of production, the minimum amount of initial capital for accumulation continuously increases. Accordingly, smaller capitals generally go to areas that are not yet dominated by large capitals. Here, competition intensifies in direct proportion to the number of capitals and in inverse proportion to their volume, quantity or value, and inevitably leads to the destruction of a large number of small capitalists. Capitalists who are either forced to merge their capital into larger capitals or everything they have evaporates and becomes the property of their competitors.

Credit –

Here it is necessary to make a brief reference to the role of the credit phenomenon in the process of capital concentration. The credit system begins to flourish from the very beginning of capitalist development. In the early stages, like water under a straw, and as a humble assistant to this mode of production, it imposes its effective existence. It links together the small financial savings scattered throughout society, makes them a bowl, places them at the disposal of the capitalist and provides a guarantee for larger and wider accumulation. A little further on, it becomes a very powerful weapon of competition and finally, as a gigantic social lever, it serves the increasing concentration of capital. With the increasing growth of capitalism and the rapid spread of accumulation, competition and the credit system become two powerful mechanisms of the process of concentration and play a role. The process of concentration allows the industrial capitalists of today to expand their scope of action and to advance a larger volume of capital. Whether concentration was carried out through the slow integration of capital and the formation of public joint-stock companies or through compulsion arising from the danger of bankruptcy and the desire to join more profitable capitals, did not affect the essence of events. What necessarily happened and determined the dynamic determinism of accumulation or the inevitable need for the development of capitalism was that capital became larger and larger and more gigantic. Concentration advanced with great speed. Separate capitals that were incapable of competition were eliminated, accumulation expanded, and large industrial enterprises became ubiquitous. If the world had had to wait until the development of accumulation in the old way and without the whirlwind of concentration provided the capital necessary for the construction of railways, humanity would have remained without railways for a long time, perhaps forever. The process of concentration not only removed the obstacles to the emergence of large capitals capable of doing these things but also became the driving force behind the great industrial revolutions.

3. The increasing development of the relative surplus population or the industrial reserve army

The pace of development of capitalist production, the growth of the productivity of labour and the ongoing changes in the organic composition of capital is much more rapid than the growth of the rate of accumulation. This is because with the development of simple accumulation and the absolute increase of social capital, the individual capitals that make it up begin to concentrate, the productivity of labour rises, and more fixed capital is employed by fewer workers. If at the beginning this ratio was one to one, then it gradually increases to two to one, three to one, four, seven, 10, 15 to one, and so on. The more capitalism grows and the more capital is accumulated, the greater and more decisive place the improvement of labour productivity takes in the dynamics of self-expansion and survival of capital. In this regard, the issue is no longer just whether the volume or small amount of capital increases or whether the length and breadth of the capital added in each new round becomes greater than the previous round. What is more important is that these increases are accompanied by increasingly vigorous labour productivity, with less labour, more and more products are produced, the rate of surplus value is much higher than before. It is with these components and developments that capital acquires the necessary competitive power and is able to seize a larger share of the surplus value produced in the spheres of domestic and international accumulation. All of this is tied to the upward trend of labour productivity. This is also followed by the forced increase in the organic composition of capital. The constant component of social capital becomes more and more rapid, huge and gigantic, and its variable component becomes smaller and smaller with the same acceleration. The emergence and increasing development of the relative surplus of the working population is an inevitable result of this process. It is needless to say that the continuous process of reducing the variable component of capital in comparison with its constant component, whether in a country or at the world level, is in no way synonymous with an absolute decrease in the number of workers; quite the contrary, this number usually increases. The important point is that this increase has no conflict with the emergence and expansion of the relative surplus of the working population. Capitalism makes the whole world a centre of research, a university, and a field for the expansion of knowledge, and it also focuses the foundation of all its scientific discoveries and advances on the rapid increase in labour productivity. With this background and identity, this system cannot fail to continuously reduce its variable component in comparison with its constant component. On this basis, the existence, growth, and reproduction of a relatively surplus working population is a necessary and inherent feature of the capitalist mode of production, while the absolute number of the working masses is also normally increasing.

But if the growth of the surplus working population is the inevitable result of the process of accumulation and development of capitalism. This phenomenon, in turn and in reverse, is also an effective lever of accumulation and, beyond that, plays a role as a condition for the existence of capitalism. The surplus working population is an industrial reserve army ready to serve capital and the capitalist system makes the most of it at critical moments. This reserve army plays a fundamental role for capital and the capitalist class and is considered an indispensable complement to the army in action. The capitalists see it as their secure property and even convince themselves that they are the benefactor and provider of this army!! While the only cause of hunger, misery, death and destruction of this huge hungry and desperate mass is themselves or, in fact, capital. All eyes of the owners of capital are fixed on the special conditions of prosperity and golden periods of accumulation. The days when the massive capital produced by the masses of workers, observing the surge of demand in the market, flows in a flood into the reserve areas and the existence of this vast army of workers becomes an indispensable necessity for the continuation and survival of capitalism. The relative surplus of the working population plays a vital role in these conditions, but its importance for capital is certainly not limited to this. The capitalists turn this vast mass of the army of workers into their most effective weapon against the employed workers. Although the unemployed population is without a single riyal of wages, although the owners of capital do not pay them a single riyal, they derive the greatest benefits from their existence in order to make the profit-making process as noisy as possible.

On the one hand, they throw the entire cost of their livelihood, treatment and survival on the shoulders of their chained workers, and on the other hand, they make their existence, in a very cruel, criminal and brutal way, a mechanism for terrible pressure on the level of wages and the decline in the price of the labour power of the employed workers. They do the same thing that their cruel slave-owning predecessors did for the purpose of entertainment. They made tearing slaves apart a means of joy, and they make the competition between workers or their duels for the sale of labour power a mechanism for obtaining the greatest surplus value. In this way, they lower the low level of wages even lower and raise the profit margin as high as possible.

Capitalism achieved the greatest progress during the twentieth century in terms of increasing the productivity of social labour and, consequently, the relative reduction of the variable part of capital in comparison with its fixed part. In this regard, especially from the last decades of that century onwards, it increased the length and breadth of the surplus labour force in a frightening way. Let us look at the current situation. The number of real unemployed people in the world, including all its forms, including unpaid domestic work, is over 2 billion people. The gigantic reserve army, whose entire cost capital, as usual, burdens on the necessary labour of the world working class, does not reduce a single riyal of its surplus value in exchange for its survival, exploits its existence brutally and criminally for the uncontrolled decline of the price of labour power or the double and several times double reduction of the necessary labour of workers, thanks to which it shatters the chain of companionship, solidarity, and comradeship of the working class in every society and throughout the world. Capital, using all its possibilities, every bit of which is born from the exploitation of workers and the embodied labour of the international proletariat, sends this huge army of caution from East to West and from North to South of the world according to its needs for valorisation and self-expansion. It has sent them in search of a place to sell labour power and deliver a morsel of bread to the bellies of children or displaced fathers and mothers of all five continents of the world. Every day, it preys on aquatic animals a large number of them whose existence is beyond the scale of need in the depths of the oceans and seas, and it places the rest in its terrifying showcases before the eyes of the workers of the world so that they become “polite” upon seeing them!! and drive the thought of any humble demand out of their heads.

4 – Various forms of existence of relative population surplus – the general law of capitalist accumulation

Capital does not make the working masses into just one form of surplus population and an omnipresent army of its own. It gives this crime various forms and makes these forms and forms more colourful from year to year. Let us not forget that all the semi-employed workers also belong to this section of the working class. Every worker spends a period of his life among this population. The number of members of this army becomes innumerable in periods of explosive technical revolutions. However, in a general division, we can distinguish between the surplus working population in fluid, latent, and stagnant forms.

Fluid – In some large industrial sectors, the process is such that massive layoffs and massive absorption of labour occur at different intervals, one after the other. As the number of employed workers increases overall, the ratio of employed workers to the volume of capital advanced decreases. Here we encounter a caravan of fluid relative surplus population. A significant part of this population is made up of young workers, whom capital, taking inhumane advantage of their hunger and need for a bite of bread, applies the deadliest form of exploitation to for a few years, and later finds their existence superfluous and surrenders to the blade of unemployment. Aside from that, capital tries to employ the young and make the elderly unemployed, increases the pressure and intensity of work and makes the masses unemployed, increases the productivity of work and sets off a tsunami of unemployment, by making the pressure of work even more severe, it lowers the average life expectancy of the working masses and makes them unemployed due to exhaustion. In all these cases, we witness the ups and downs of the relative surplus population with an upward trend.

Hidden – As capitalist production dominates agriculture, capital’s need for agricultural workers is decreasing despite the dramatic expansion of accumulation. This leads to the migration of labour to large industrial centres. A migration that reveals the existence of a vast surplus labour population in the countryside. A surplus population that exists before the migration but is hidden and whose full extent becomes apparent when it sees the prospect of selling labour power.

Stagnant – The third and largest form of surplus labour population is made up of billions of seasonals, part-time, irregularly employed workers, unpaid or perhaps paid domestic workers, and the like. This segment of the global working class performs the most gruelling and deadly work with the longest working hours for the lowest wages, a large segment of them, namely housewives, endure the deadliest work, more than two shifts, all 365 days of the year, without even a single riyal of wages. They are not workers of any specific capitalist, they do not have a worker’s ID card, no one, not even their chained associates, is willing to accept that they are workers. They work for the capitalist class, for the social capital of countries and the entire global capital, they cook, clean, give birth to and raise successive generations of labour force needed by the bourgeoisie, with their work they play a huge role in reducing the cost of labour force of the vast mass of their class and in the interest of capital, they take the cost of kindergartens and preschools and nursing homes and care centres for the elderly and dozens of other astronomical costs off the shoulders of the capitalists. With these works, they play a huge role in making the annual surplus values ​​of the social capital of each society galactic.  

The stagnant surplus of the working population is the poorest section of the working class everywhere in the world. They have the worst working and living conditions. They witness the most extensive births and population growth. The more they increase in number, the poorer and more miserable they become. The mass of children without guardians, the vast layer of the lumpen proletariat, the cursed forced into prostitution, the army of hungry homeless refugees condemned to earn a living by begging, the horde of so-called criminals, the disabled and disabled, in a word, a very large and incalculable percentage of the entire working population on earth, belong to this most miserable section of the working class. In the case of this very dense layer of wage slaves of capital, or basically the entire relative surplus of the working population, apart from the points we have mentioned so far, there are other fundamental and important issues that need to be explained. This is not the place to do so here. Nevertheless, it is necessary to mention some of them, even if only by title.

First: One of the dirtiest and most heinous distortions of capitalism and its theorists, economists, sociologists, and statesmen is that they obscure the true roots of the existence and the increasing or uncontrolled expansion of this population. They shamelessly suggest that the relative surplus population and its various forms are not an inevitable, inherent, and inescapable product of the capitalist mode of production, as if the foundation of its existence must be found in the phenomenon known as “psychological and social abnormalities.” These deaf workers’ brainwashers are unwilling to accept the naked reality that capitalism is, in its very nature, a volcano of abnormality, and that attributing causes to effects is merely the practical and intellectual obstinacy of capital to suppress the consciousness of the working masses. The root of the relative surplus population in general, in all its forms, including its dense layer and stagnant labyrinth in the depths of the relation of buying and selling of labour power, lies in the infectious womb of capital. As long as this octopus system persists, the length and breadth of this population will also increase day by day.

Second: The second deception of the intellectual representatives of the bourgeoisie is that they try to pretend that the capitalist system is suffering from the existence of this population and is thinking of reducing its dimensions!! The reality is the opposite. Let us remember one fundamental point. Capitalism, at the core of its existence, is a prisoner of the deepest contradictions. The golden dream of every capitalist is to be able to exploit all the moving creatures of the world from birth to death and to make every cell of their existence a dancing drop of the river of surplus values. There is no doubt about this, but the discussion is not about the dreams of the capitalists but about the capitalist system with the mountain of contradictions that it has in its nature. The relative surplus population is the product of the contradictory existence of capital, and the fundamental problem is that capitalism transforms this acute inherent contradiction into the deadliest weapon for intensifying the exploitation of the global working class. Let us look at the current historical conditions. Of the total population of four billion working-age workers in the world, more than two billion people practically do not receive a single riyal of wages from any capitalist, but this entire gigantic contingent of workers works for capital in various ways, is exploited in the worst possible way, and their existence is no less than that of employed workers, a necessity of the cycle of capital’s appreciation and self-aggrandizement. In the most advanced capitalist countries, in Scandinavia and Western Europe, tens of millions of them live off the wages of the chain-operated payment companies and, under the pressure of the democratic power of the bourgeoisie, work for the capitalists without a single riyal of wages. We have already spoken about the more than one billion housewives in the world, and there is no need to repeat it. The number of seasonal workers in the world is skyrocketing. The part of the international working class that generates huge rivers of surplus value on an hourly or daily basis, without any contract, without any guarantee of tomorrow’s work, is several times greater than the part that has little hope for its own tomorrow’s work. Capital makes the most of this surplus population of several billion to brutally intensify the exploitation of the working class.

5 – Statistical demonstration of the general law of capitalist accumulation

1. England 1846 to 1866: No period in the history of modern society is as comprehensive a mirror of the realities of capitalist accumulation as these twenty years. England is the classic example of the growth of this accumulation, the only country in which capitalist production has been fully developed and occupies the first place in the world market. During this historical interval the population has grown in absolute terms, but this growth has declined in relative or percentage terms. In the years 1811 to 1861 it has fallen from over one and fifty-five per cent to one and fourteen per cent. The reverse is true of capital and wealth. The rate of profit, ground rent and taxable income in Britain in the period 1853 to 1864 was growing at an annual rate of more than four and a half per cent, and ground rents relating to houses, railways, fisheries, mines and the like were growing at an annual rate of about five per cent. The remarkable development of accumulation was accompanied by a process of concentration and concentration of capital. Between 1851 and 1861 the number of farms under 40 acres in the ten counties of England fell from 31,583 to 26,595, of which 5,016 were due to the merger of smaller holdings into larger agricultural holdings. From 1815 to 1825 no estates over a million pounds were subject to inheritance tax, but from 1825 to 1855 eight estates were subject to it. Incomes over £60 subject to tax in England, Wales and Scotland rose to £95,844,221 in 1864 and to £105,435,579 in 1865.

Let us consider how the accumulation in the mining sector grew. The amount of coal extracted, which in 1855 was about 61,543,079 tons, valued at £16,113,167, rose in 1864 to 92,787,873 tons, valued at £23,197,968. In the same period, the production of pig iron rose from 3,218,145 tons, valued at £8,045,385, to 4,676,951 tons, valued at £11,919,877.

The length of railways in use increased from 13,000 km in 1854 to 20,000 km in 1864. The total of British exports and imports rose from £268,210,145 in 1854 to £489,923,285 in 1856.

Let us also mention the fate of the producers of these capitals, the life of the working class, during this same period. The share of the workers in this gigantic growth of accumulation was only poverty and humiliation, and the destruction of their homes and increased mortality. The number of workers who fell into the abyss of unemployment and lost every means of livelihood, the workers who succumbed to the knife of deadly hunger and became homeless, the workers who, driven by poverty and misery, found their only means of livelihood in begging, the number of this section of the English working class, according to the censuses, increased from 851,369 in 1855 to 877,767 in 1856 and then to 971,433 in 1863. This figure reached 1,079,382 in 1864 and continued to grow at a frightening rate of 20 percent in the following years. The above statistical picture that Marx depicts of the dimensions of the expansion of capital accumulation on the one hand and the deterioration of the living conditions of the working class on the other, belongs to the fourth to sixth decades of the nineteenth century. An analysis of the explosive continuation of this statistical picture in the process of capitalist expansion and development in subsequent periods, especially from the middle of the twentieth century to the present day, is literally terrifying and a story of the greatest human catastrophe in the entire history of human societies.

It is enough to look at the curve of the increase in the volume of surplus value produced by the global working class between 1960 and 2020 on the one hand, and the trend of increasing misery, hunger, homelessness, dehydration and mortality resulting from the intensity of capitalist exploitation on the other, to see a picture, albeit incomplete, of the length and breadth of this historical catastrophe. The curve says that the amount of surplus value in 1960 was 11 trillion and 365 billion dollars, and since then it has risen to 19 trillion and 167 billion dollars in 1970, to 27 trillion and 871 billion dollars in 1980, to 37 trillion and 905 billion dollars in 1990, to 49 trillion and 941 billion dollars in 2000, to 66 trillion and 113 billion dollars in 2010, and finally to the mark of 85 trillion dollars in 2019. In the same period of time and precisely in the conditions that the mountain of capital accumulation has buried the entire world under its rubble. The pressure of poverty, hunger, displacement, homelessness of the global working class and the degree of deprivation of the working masses from water, food, clothing, health, medicine and treatment have become several times more severe than in the past. Billions of people have been deprived of finding work and the world’s working population has increased. The hungry and poverty-stricken layer of the working class has grown like a cancer and has become the dominant part of its class.

B – Low-wage strata of British industrial workers:

Even the research of the Council of Trustees of the Crown shows that a significant part of the working class in England, along with the ever-increasing expansion of industrial accumulation in the fourth to sixth decades of the nineteenth century, suffered from severe food shortages and inadequate nutrition, succumbed to starvation and struggled with all the fatal diseases resulting from malnutrition resulting from the intensity of capitalist exploitation. The low consumption of nitrogen among silk weavers, hand-sewers, glove weavers, agricultural workers, and leather workers is very noticeable. All these workers also suffer the consequences of the lack of carbon in their food. Poverty and malnutrition are rampant among urban workers, and the women and children of working-class families in the countryside are in a very poor nutritional condition. The statistics are quite clear that half of the working population has absolutely no access to milk. The average weekly consumption of liquid food among tailors is about 2 Liters and among handloom workers is seven-tenths of a Liter. The weekly consumption of bread is at best a little over 5 kilos, and a large percentage is about 3 kilos or a little more. Dr. Simon, the chief physician of the special inspection, writes in his report:

“Poor nutrition is certainly a factor in the exacerbation of diseases, but attention must be paid to a general factor of health. Food deprivation is something that people reluctantly endure; severe food poverty appears in the wake of other deprivations. Long before the inadequacy of nutrition became a naked subject of discussion among doctors and physiologists, long before the gross mortality resulting from the deficiency of nitrogen, carbon, and milk in the workers’ diet attracted attention, the working family was immersed in the abyss of poverty and misery in terms of the minimum subsistence. The condition of the worker’s clothing and fuel is much worse and more deadly than his food. The cramped living space is so small that the health of every member of the family is seriously endangered. The worker has no means in his dwelling, everything he has is either sold or pawned under the pressure of hunger, in such a situation, cleanliness and hygiene have become meaningless and any amount of observance of them leads to greater hunger. The areas where workers live are a breeding ground for all microbes and viruses. They lack clean water and minimal cleanliness; they are a kind of garbage dump full of all pathogenic organisms. When poverty reaches the level of food poverty, a world of other misery and misery has already been imposed on the poor, and the workers are in such a situation. Let us remember that the poverty that afflicts these people is the poverty of the vast mass of people who workday and night and produce the sky-high mountains of capital. (Abridged quote with a little appropriation)

The more rapid the accumulation of capital, the more miserable the housing situation of the working class became. The renovation of cities, the construction of modern buildings for department stores, banks and investment centres, the widening of streets to facilitate trade and the passage of cars, the construction of trams and similar facilities, which were the needs of the greater accumulation of capital and the greater development of capitalism, forced the workers to migrate to cheaper areas, to live in slums and slums. The more modern the capitalist construction industry became, the more houses were built, the more villas and palaces increased in number, the more disastrous, humiliating, unsanitary and inhuman the housing situation of the workers became. Let us look again at Simon’s report on workers’ quarters:

“Overcrowding in houses necessarily implies the negation of any measured behaviour and is accompanied by the unclean mixing of bodies, the problems of defecation, a high degree of nakedness of sexual organs and acts, a situation that is not worthy of a human being, the children who give birth in these cursed neighbourhoods, bathe in abominations, the effect of these conditions on their upbringing is very terrible and painful…”

The more the accumulation becomes gigantic. The number of homeless people and workers without any shelter increases. A huge mass who has no shelter except their workplace and spend the entire time between the end of today’s work and the beginning of the next day’s work by the railway and similar places, in these same places they languish, suffer, are humiliated and wear themselves out. The justice of capitalism!! It is an amazing story. When the owner of land, shop, house, gives up his property for the sake of urban development projects, he not only receives full compensation but also receives a heavy profit according to the law, but the opposite is true for the workers. They have to be displaced with their wives and newborn children in the streets, and what is more brutal is that even their sheltering on the side of the streets is considered a roadblock and a violation of the beauty of the city, they are punished for this crime!

C – Homeless people:

Let us consider the situation of the workers who come from the villages. They are the ubiquitous infantry of capitalism, in the darkness of losing all means of livelihood and facing death from poverty, they go to the cities to earn a living by selling their labour. Before they can find work, they have to settle down somewhere, they cannot afford to pay any rent and are forced to build the most primitive huts on the outskirts of the city. They build shantytown after shantytown, where they can live with their wives and children at night and during the day produce mountains of capital for the capitalist class and build mountain huts.  These migrant rural workers bring all diseases with them from their birthplace to their current place of residence, and therefore the prevalence of all diseases in these slums or shanty towns is an inseparable part of their lives. Sewers full of infection, overcrowding in each neighbourhood and each separate slum, the terrible pollution of the respiratory space, the lack of the most elementary sanitary facilities, constantly expand the scope of the spread of diseases. The number of children who die from smallpox and dozens of similar diseases in these slums sometimes exceeds 5 children in a humble shed. The flood of capital accumulation has brought all these great blessings to the cursed workers. What the propaganda trumpets of capital say about the wonderful achievements of industry and the development of capitalism, as far as the workers, the vast majority of the earth’s population, are concerned, these are the same glorious and shining blessings!!! This is hunger, slums, misery and deadly diseases.

The situation of the mine workers is no better than that of the rural migrant workers. They have higher wages than other workers, and we have already said what heavy penalties they pay for this difference. The mine owner is stubborn and it is very beneficial for him that all the neighbouring workers live wall to wall in the mine, that the battalion is always ready and ready to serve within the four walls of the profit-making headquarters, that they have no dreams, not even a moment of peace, a walk by the road or a conversation with their wives and children, they all work and deliver extra work. With this same identity, the mine owner obviously wants a class of workers to build their own housing near the mine, but he is determined to give the minimum area of ​​land to the working class for this purpose. In such a way that they are crowded together in cramped huts several meters apart, one floor above the other. The lack of toilets in these places is catastrophic; no sign of hygiene can be seen. The drinking water situation is pitiful; the conditions are like barracks. Any worker or any member of a worker’s family who disobeys the regulations approved by the mine owner receives a punishment card, which means that he is in danger of losing his residential area. The workers are locked in their shantytowns, and the accommodation more than anything else resembles a medieval serf camp. The worker is forced to accept any house offered by the mine owner and in return for it he surrenders part of his wages, he must also pay the price of water, the capitalist considers himself the owner of the worker. All diseases here are busy hunting for human life, and the working masses are forced to work amidst the storm of these diseases and produce and increase the capital of the capitalist class.

D – The effects of the crisis on the higher-wage layer of the working class

The collapse of one of the London banking giants in 1866 and the immediate collapse of many companies sounded the trumpet of the crisis. The shipbuilding industry and some other sectors were plunged into the abyss of crisis. The first and most immediate reaction of the owners of capital to the wave of the crisis was the mass unemployment of workers and the expulsion of thousands of them, including skilled workers with high wages, from various companies and work centres. Tens of thousands of workers whose surplus labour was the source of rivers of profit and had made England a high mountain of capital were dismissed from their jobs without any means of livelihood. The Morning Star correspondent says in his report:

“In Poplar, Millwall, Greenwich, and two other boroughs, at least 15,000 workmen, with their numerous families, are living in utter misery. Three thousand skilled mechanics, after seven months of unemployment, are busy breaking stone in a place called the “Workhouse,” in front of which a vast army of hungry unemployed people are crowded, their ranks so dense and long that it is difficult to find the end. This crowd is struggling for bread stamps. The yard is covered with snow, but the workmen are forced to break stone. Each workman has to break 181 Liters of ice-covered granite with an axe, in order to receive only three pence, and with this wage to bring an empty loaf of bread to the hungry bellies of his family. These are workmen who before the crisis received the highest wages compared with their fellow workers. Their daily food now consists of a few slices of bread with a little melted fat and a cup of tea without milk. Many do not have even that. Large families who have spent the last rial of their employment and have no hope of survival are forced to live in the worst form of shantytowns. They have lost all hope of survival and are breathing only because they receive an inadequate meal from the “workhouse” every day and night, enduring a world of humiliation. Despair and deprivation have taken over their entire being and they have lost the passion for talking to each other. In every family, there are some people who are sick without having any money to consult a doctor and get medicine. The evidence is clear that millions of workers have reached the breaking point of this situation. A fact that even the most conservative circles do not deny.”

The Standard, a Tory newspaper, wrote: “Yesterday the capital witnessed a terrifying sight. A terrible flood of human masses was marching and revolting. These people are on the verge of death from hunger. They numbered about 40,000. It is a fact, a very terrible fact, that in the capital of England, wall to wall of the greatest accumulation of wealth that history has ever seen, 40,000 hungry people are huddled together. They constitute half the hungry of society and are always hungry, and have turned their heads to other parts of the city, all of them crying out their hunger, poverty, suffering and pain, talking about the painful and pitiful state of housing, about the work that cannot be found and about the humiliation and humiliation that has brought their lives to their knees…”

These are just some of the consequences and effects of the spread of the inherent crisis of capitalism on the lives of the working masses, including the highest-paid workers during the boom period. The vast mass of people who have accumulated society from capital are thus sacrificed as soon as the crisis begins, and the capitalist system invalidates their license to survive and that of all their families. These days, bourgeois circles in England speak of Belgium as a “workers’ paradise.” In order to understand where this group sees the paradise of the working class or the last permissible limits of welfare, food, and comfort for the working masses, it is not a bad idea to look at the book by Mr. “Dosseptio” a member of the commission of the Statistical Centre of this country, entitled “The Economic Budget of the Belgian Working Class.” He explains that: “In a Belgian family of six, at least four people, fathers and sons, work, and their wages total about one franc. A wage that is barely enough for food equivalent to that of prisoners!! With the difference that a prisoner does not have the minimum housing costs. The workers live off their daily rations, eat barley bread instead of wheat bread, eat meat very rarely and most of them never eat it, do not consume butter and seasonings, the large family is crowded into one room, the girl and the boy sleep together on the same mattress under the pressure of forced poverty, do not buy clothes, economize as much as possible in cleaning, do not dream of entertainment, they live in the swamp of poverty, while they are exhausted under the pressure of long daily work.” This is the image of the “workers’ paradise” of the world from the perspective of the English capitalists.

E – The British Agricultural Proletariat

Everyone admits that the condition of the agricultural labourers of England is much more miserable and impoverished than that of their predecessors forty years ago. This condition is becoming more painful every day. Previously, at the end of the Anti-Jacobin War, under the so-called “Poor Law”, because of the danger of mass starvation among the workers of this area, the counties paid a nominal amount of wages less than the nominal amount necessary for a hard vegetable life, which showed how low wages were and how the agricultural labourer had become a serf in his/her area. A reality that the bourgeoisie tries with all its might to conceal. But when the layers and parties of this class fight like predators over the division of profits, capital, power and property, they raise the curtains against each other and sometimes even reveal the secrets of crimes against the workers. The report of the newspaper “Morning Chronicle” is the most important organ of the liberals, including these curtains, and is noteworthy in this respect. The newspaper’s correspondent has published the results of his research on the wage and housing conditions of the workers of three villages belonging to aristocratic farmers. We will summarize the report in the form of a headline below, but before that, we must mention a few points. The repeal of the “Corn Laws” brought about a golden era of prosperity for English agriculture. New methods of fertilization, advanced irrigation systems, extensive drainage of fields, artificial cultivation of fodder, the use of mechanical fertilizer spreading devices, more favourable methods of cultivating clay soils, the use of steam engines and all kinds of machinery became the order of the day for the owners of capital. The yield of land rose rapidly, the cost of production fell dramatically, many farms were merged, the area of ​​cultivated land in many areas increased rapidly. The productivity of social labour rose rapidly, and the number of agricultural workers was reduced. All these events happened in favour of capital and the capitalist aristocratic farmers, in this direction the profits became astronomical, and the accumulation broke out in an unprecedented way. It is very important to know that the report of the reporter of the “Morning Chronicle” was prepared and published precisely in the context of these conditions, in the heart of this dreamy boom of capital and on the shore of the raging sea of ​​the capitalists’ astronomical profits. The report reveals that:

“… In the first village, the total weekly wage of a working family of four, consisting of two adults and two children, with one member employed, is 8 shillings, from which one and sometimes two shillings are deducted as rent for the dwelling. The weekly income per head of the family does not exceed, at best, 1 shilling and 5 to 1 shilling and 9 pence. The weekly wage of a family of eight with 6 children, including one employed child, is recorded at 10 shillings, of which 2 shillings are allocated for the rent of the dwelling, and the weekly income per head is 1 shilling. In the second village, the wage of a family of eight with 6 children is 7 shillings, and if one child works, it reaches 8 shillings, of which one shilling is spent on rent, and finally, in the third village, the situation is almost the same. Other sources and reports on the level of wages, housing and health of agricultural workers confirm the points we have seen above. Professor Rogers, in a text published on the occasion, states that the life of these workers is more disastrous than that of their eighteenth-century serf ancestors. They eat much less, they are worse dressed, their living quarters are more miserable. Everything has become worse for them. The seasonal or local shortage of labour not only does not have the effect of raising their wages but also forces women and children to work more. The age limit for children and women to enter the labour market is constantly being lowered, which means that the monstrous exploitation of the ever-increasing mass of agricultural workers in turn produces a larger surplus of labourers, a phenomenon that melts the hearts of the capitalists because they can reduce wages with indescribable cruelty. In the East of England, in the counties of Lincolnshire, Huntingdonshire, Cambridgeshire, Norfolk, Suffolk, and Nottinghamshire, the same process has led to the emergence of the system of mobile groups. In a large part of these counties, the coastal lands have been transformed into fertile plains by the retreat of the water. The landed aristocracy pour their flood capital into these plains, and by the use of the steam engine and the drainage of the water, they daily increase the volume of accumulation. The workers who are exploited here are called “mobile groups.” These all come from distant villages, and by hunting and brutally exploiting them, the owners of capital have completely freed themselves from the construction of huts and the discussion of the place of residence of the worker. The mobile gang consists of 10 to 50 women, girls and boys. The girls and boys are between 6 and 13 years old. Each gang works under the control and domination of an individual who is himself an agricultural labourer but is very much in the capitalist’s favour due to his rudeness and ugly nature. He does not earn more than other workers, but he plays the role of a contractor, and the members of the gang take orders from him. Every rial more he earns than other workers is tied to the brutality he uses to extract more work from the gang members in the shortest possible time. In other words, the curve of his wages is a function of his violence against his fellow workers and the role he plays in increasing the profits of capital. The women, along with the children, boys and girls, do the hardest work, the intensity of their work is deadly. Every day they have to walk eight and sometimes eleven kilometres to reach the slaughterhouse, which is called the workplace. After finishing work, they have to walk the same way. The leader of the gang is armed with a long stick, he pays the wages in the tavern, and it is his custom to get drunk enough, and while drunk, two women, three-day labourers, take him by the arm. At the same time, he walks ahead of the others towards the house, the children, boys and girls, walking behind him, singing disgusting and disgusting songs, and doing everything that is in his nature. The pregnancy of young girls in these farms is a common occurrence and a gift of the brilliant civilization of capitalism!! Despite all his pro-capitalist and anti-worker qualities, the gang leader is not so hateful to the workers, especially the young workers. Because on the days when the capitalist owner of the farm begins to dismiss each of his exploited cursed ones due to the completion of agricultural work, he sets out, in order not to remain unemployed himself, contacts the capitalists who own other farms, concludes contracts with them, transfers the unemployed to new slaughterhouses and at the same time makes them grateful to the broker of his darkness.

Part Seven – Continued

Chapter Twenty-Four: What is called primitive accumulation

1 – The secret of primitive accumulation

The accumulation of capital depends on the existence of surplus value. Surplus value requires the existence of the capitalist mode of production and the exploitation of labour by capital. For capitalist production, a considerable volume of capital must be in the hands of its advancer. In this way, we are faced with a vicious circle for which we must seek a starting point, and primary accumulation is this starting point. Money and commodities are not capital in themselves, they must become capital, but this transformation is only possible under certain conditions. Conditions in which the owners of two completely different commodities come face to face. On the one hand, the owners of money and means of production, who are greedy for increasing the values ​​they own by purchasing the labour power of others, and on the other hand, the “free” workers!! who are the sellers of the commodity of labour power as their only property. The meaning of free workers is that they are neither part of the means of production like serfs, nor are they landowners and property owners like independent peasants. With these two classes at the two poles of the commodity market, the basic conditions for capitalist production were provided. The capital relationship is based on the complete separation of the worker from all the necessities and possibilities of material realization of his labour, and in fact, separation from his labour. This mode of production, once it has established itself, not only maintains this separation, but reproduces it on a much larger scale. The process by which the capital relation is created is therefore at the same time the process of the complete separation of the worker from the ownership of his means of labour and from the process of determining the fate of his own work and life. Through this process, firstly, the social means of production and life become capital, and secondly, the producers are immediately transformed into wage labourers. Thus, so-called primary accumulation is nothing other than the historical process of the separation of the producer from his means of production. It is called primary because on one hand it is connected with the prehistoric period of capital and capitalist production. What is accumulated is not yet the surplus value resulting from the exploitation of the wage labourer. The economic structure of capitalism has grown out of the feudal economy. The dissolution of the latter has liberated the elements necessary for the formation of the former. One of the historical events that transforms the producers into wage labourers is their liberation from the serfdom and constraints of the feudal system. Bourgeois historians and thinkers, through deception and distortion, only see and trumpet this process of the story, while they deliberately and fraudulently keep other important processes out of the reach of human consciousness. Among these practices, firstly, the new “free” people!! became sellers of their own bodies only when all their means of production and everything that guaranteed their life and survival in the previous system were completely taken from them, and the history of this expropriation was recorded in the annals of humanity with letters of fire, blood and brutality. Secondly, the earthly and real meaning of this so-called “freedom” was a complete separation from the dynamics of determining the fate of work, production and life, and in this regard, the loss of any kind of real human freedom, rights and authority. What happened was the enslavement of the worker. The form of enslavement changed and became mysterious. Capitalist exploitation replaced feudal exploitation. In the history of early accumulation, all the transformations involved in the emergence of the capitalist class are epoch-making, but this attribute is especially true of those specific historical moments when huge masses of people are forcibly and suddenly separated from their means of life and work and thrown onto the market as workers. The history of this expropriation has taken on various colours and has gone through different stages in different countries. This history has taken a classic form in England. Let’s examine it.

2 – Expropriation of land from rural residents

The system of serfdom in England came to an end at the end of the fourteenth century. The vast majority of the population, especially in the fifteenth century, consisted of free peasants. There were wage-earning agricultural workers, and they consisted of two classes. The first class consisted of peasants who worked in their spare time on large estates. The second class consisted of truly wage-earning workers, who were few in number. Even the latter class was in the form of independent peasants. They worked for wages but were given two or three acres of land with a cottage and had the right to use the commons. The foreshadowing of the transformation that laid the foundation of capitalist production took place in the last third of the fifteenth century and the first half of the sixteenth century. With the dissolution of the feudal serfdom, the proletarians, emerging from the cage of the old system, poured into the slaughterhouse of the labour market. The power of the monarchy, which was the result of the growth of the bourgeoisie, in its struggle to consolidate its foundations in the form of an absolute monarchy, had the forcible dissolution of these serfdoms as its agenda, but the collapse of the aforementioned groups did not stem only from this. A more important factor was also at work. The great feudal lords, in their struggle with the king and parliament, began to drive the peasants out of the feudal lands, and they also seized the common lands. Why? The answer was clear, the rapid expansion of the wool manufacturing industry and the rise in the price of this commodity in England overwhelmed all the senses of these feudal lords. The old aristocracy was on the decline due to feudal wars, and the new aristocracy was a child of its time and saw money above all powers. For them, turning arable land into sheep pastures was considered a way to hunt for money, the land had to be turned into pastures, and the peasants had to be thrown out. This happened. Many villages were destroyed, the houses of the peasants and the huts of the agricultural workers were razed to the ground, their inhabitants were left in poverty, the vast lands on which this population earned their living through work were all turned into pastures and became the property of the landlords. To reduce the pressure of this process, Henry VII, with the law of 1489, prohibited the demolition of peasant houses with 8 hectares of land. This law was re-enacted five years later, with a gloating over the continued seizure of farms and large herds of cattle by a few, the extraordinary increase in land rents, the decline of agriculture, the destruction of houses and churches. But neither the first proclamation of the law, nor its re-enactment, nor the repeated legislation of Charles I and later Cromwell, solved the problem. The devastation of the villages became more widespread, and the ruin of the peasants accelerated. The relationship of buying and selling labour power was about to develop, and capital demanded wage labour. Everything had to begin to obey the dictates of capital. The religious renaissance of the sixteenth century and the widespread plunder of church property significantly intensified the process of forcible expropriation of small producers and the peasantry. Until the beginning of the movement, the Catholic Church was the feudal owner of a large part of the land in England. With the dissolution of the monasteries, a large portion of those lands were sold to court luminaries, farmers, and land brokers, and their inhabitants were directly added to the vast mass of labourers. The multitude of cursed people without any means of livelihood became so explosive that Queen Elizabeth’s reign saw no other option than to recognize the phenomenon of poverty and enact the Poor Law, a law that was later declared permanent.

Until the last few decades of the seventeenth century, independent peasants still outnumbered landlords. It was this large peasant population that formed the backbone of Cromwell’s power, and the opposite was the high and mighty lords and their servants or the village clergy. By 1750, there was no trace of the independent peasant, and what had existed under the name of the workers’ commons was also erased from the page of English history by the end of the century. The agrarian revolution had taken its toll. A revolution whose economic aspects we will ignore and confine ourselves to a hint at the levers of coercion involved. Following the return of the Stuarts, the English landlords took action whose real result was to replace the feudal right of possession of land with the right of modern ownership. Unlike their European counterparts, they also legally sealed this. They passed laws on the place of residence of the peasants, which resulted in the English agricultural labourers being what the famous Russian Tsar Boris Godunov had done for the Russian serfs. The revolution, with the reign of William III, brought the landowners and profit-seeking capitalists to power. They accelerated the process of appropriation of state lands, which they had been carrying out with peace ableness before, and brought it to the highest level. They also carried the process of appropriation of church property to the last extremity, and by successfully navigating all these twists and turns laid the foundation of the modern English oligarchic lordly property. The English capitalists generally approved of these developments, because their occurrence transformed land into a mere commodity, large and modern agriculture flourished on a very large scale, and the population of disenfranchised workers, ready to sell their labour at the lowest price, was increasing all the more. Besides, the new landed aristocracy was a convenient ally of the bankers, the owners of the growing finance capital, and the manufacturers.

The forcible seizure of common property with feudal cover was accompanied by the conversion of arable land into pasture. A process that began at the end of the 15th century and continued in the 16th century. Until the 18th century, it was suggested that legislators were working to stop this process!!, but what actually happened was that the aforementioned process, without any reference to any law, advanced with the weapon of force and finally it was the law that hung the medal of honour for its approval on its chest!!. The seizure of land obtained the legal authorization of Parliament and made it its own forcible ornament. The bills for the division of common land practically allowed landowners to turn the common lands of the previous periods and the lands of the peasants into their own private property wherever they wanted and to gift them to each other. The increase in the length and width of large capitalist farms accelerated the dispossession of small landowners and their transformation into a displaced proletariat seeking work. However, in the 18th century, unlike the 19th century, the complete and inevitable identification of “national wealth” with the poverty and deprivation of the majority of the population had not yet gained firm acceptance. That is why we witness lively debates in the literature of those days about the “distribution of common lands.” Literature that expresses the anger of individuals over the rapid consolidation of farms, the crimes of the lords in converting fields into pastures, the destruction of agriculture, the disappearance of villages, the destruction of stables, the ruin of peasants’ homes and their transformation into wage labourers, the growing monopoly of land ownership in the light of the law on the distribution of common lands, and the like. Political economy, which considers the defence of private property as its own religion and the honour of creation, not only had no objection to these violent expropriations accompanied by all kinds of atrocities, but on the contrary, it was a fiery guard armed to the teeth. The reason is obvious: these expropriations and expropriations were a prerequisite for the establishment of the relationship of buying and selling labour power and the ever more rapid development of the capitalist mode of production.

And finally, the last great process of dispossession of the peasants from the land was their massive eviction from the lords’ estates. When there were no more peasants to clear, the time came to sweep away their huts from these lands and put them into practice. An event that, as a display of the most shameless scenes of crimes against humanity, was seen as an essential moment in the process of capitalist expansion and the establishment of this mode of production in England, took place throughout the country, but what happened in Scotland by the chieftains, and again as a forced step and moment to pave the way for capitalist domination, was rightly the most shameful and heinous of all. To mention just one example. The Duchess of Sutherland, the chief of one of the chieftains who had a high economic literacy, was determined to turn the entire province of Sutherland into one huge pasture. She systematically and legally prosecuted the entire population of the region, threw everyone out of their homes, burned entire villages, and burned an old woman who refused to leave her dwelling in the flames. The drug-addicted economist and chief of the tribe thus took possession of about 322,000 hectares of land belonging to the province and turned it into pasture. Of course, he did not forget his royal patronage!!! In return for the forcible seizure of the aforementioned 322,000 hectares of arable land, he ceded 2,428 hectares of completely barren and barren coastal land to the evicted inhabitants, with the strict and mandatory condition of collecting a rent of 6 shillings per hectare!! The chief of the tribe then allocated all the lands to 29 sheep breeding units. The vast population of the wretched outcasts were forced to join the amphibian branch of the planet, to bring their today to tomorrow through fishing, but this amphibian life was also very short. The Scottish fishermen of the province of Sutherland, although generation after generation, had the scars of the cruelty, aggression, plunder and crime of their masters engraved on their cells, continued to worship the kings of the clans. They took the caught fish to the mountains, lit a prayer fire and held ceremonies to worship the masters. The smell of the grilled fish reached the chief of the clan. The chief issued a decree for the expulsion and displacement of all the coastal inhabitants again, and it did not take long for the lands where they lived to become fishing grounds rented by London fishmongers.

3 – Bloody legislation against the dispossessed, forced collapse of wages with the weapon of the law

The number of dispossessed peasants and small producers was greater than the market demand for labour. Let us not forget that the fledgling immigrant proletariat was simply unable to break away from all previous interests and customs and adapt itself to new conditions. A large group, under the scourge of hunger, resorted to begging, stealing, and vagrancy. It was here that the legislative machine of capital began to work. Parliament was set up, the fathers of the present working class sat on the bench of criminals, they were criminals in the legal court of capital, and their crime was that vagrancy and theft were their own choice or their nature! If they wanted to, they could go back to the past!! A past that was erased from the pages of history by capital and was lost forever. In England, these laws began in the time of Henry VII. The king announced that very old beggars would be given a begging license, vagrants would be thrown into prison, whipped, tied to a cart, whipped until their bodies bled, and finally sworn to return to their birthplace or the place where they had resided for the last three years!! And to accept any work. This law was re-enacted in the twenty-seventh year of Henry’s reign, and this time it added that anyone caught for vagrancy a second time would be punished with whipping and half of their ear would be cut off. The law continued that the punishment for vagrancy for the third time was hanging. The laws were lined up one after the other. Edward VI decreed that if a person refused to work, he would be condemned to slavery for the person who exposed his unemployment!! The master had the right to punish this slave with whips and chains and to force him to do any hard work of any degree of disgust and abomination!! If a slave was absent for two weeks, he would be condemned to lifelong slavery, the seal of slavery would be engraved on his forehead or back, and if he ran away three times, the death sentence would be carried out on him. The master had the right to sell him, give him away, and rent him out. He also had all the powers he had over his property and livestock regarding his slaves. A slave who did something against his master would be hanged. A vagrant would become a slave for life if he lied about his place of birth. Anyone had the right to take the children of vagrants as apprentices. Masters could chain these children if they were over 20 and tried to run away!!! It was through these crimes and barbarities that the capitalist mode of production paved the way for its development and establishment.

Consider the Elizabethan era. The Act of 1572 stipulated that unlicensed beggars over the age of 14 were to be flogged until death, their left ears branded, and if they were repeat offenders and over the age of 18, they were to be hanged and shot. If they resorted to begging for a third time under the pressure of hunger, they were to be shot as felons. Similar laws, including what came to be known as the “Law of Thirteen,” were enacted and enforced in the eighteenth year of Elizabeth’s reign.

Let us look back to the reign of James I. Anyone who begs must be publicly flogged. For the first time he must be imprisoned for six months, for the second time for two years, and during all this time he must be whipped according to the order of the judges. If he is a lewd and wicked man, his left shoulder must be branded with the letter “R” and he must be sentenced to hard labour. If he begs again, he must be hanged or shot without any mercy. These laws were in force everywhere until the beginning of the eighteenth century. The same laws were also enforced with force in France in the seventeenth century. The codes of Louis XVI in this country, Charles V in Holland, and similar laws in other countries of Western Europe, were all implemented with the same degree of cruelty, cruelty, and savagery.

Let us emphasize once again a naked truth, but under the greatest rubble of the brutal inversions of the bourgeoisie. The primitive accumulation phase of capital and the capitalist mode of production, thus, opened its way into the history of human life with these barbarities, massacres and anti-humanities. Capital was inherently and historically, in the very dawn of its emergence, criminal, predatory, murderous, against any kind of right, freedom, choice or free breathing of man, hunger-producing, poverty-creating, destructive, corrupt, deceitful, bloodthirsty, leeching and rabid. Capital displayed this anti-human nature in its class personification in the form of the bourgeoisie, in the structure of law, vote, rights and everything. With this cruelty and human slaughter, it came to power. If later, along with the process of development, expansion and economic dominance, political rule and global domination in the world, a glimmer of right, freedom, and the choice of prosperity appeared, it had nothing to do with capital, capitalist production, or the bourgeoisie. Quite the contrary, it was the result of the class struggle of the working masses against capital and the product of the capitalist class’s emergency and at the same time profit-seeking and expedient retreat against the global labour movement.

The proletariat emerged as a class in the second half of the fourteenth century. In the following century it became a small part of the population, a part in which independent peasant property in the countryside and guild organization in the city determined the fabric of its growing social existence and position. The worker and the employer were not yet very far apart, either in the city or in the countryside, the subordination of labour to capital was only formal, meaning that the accumulation of capital was still in its primitive phase, the variable element of capital prevailing over its constant element. With each accumulation of capital, the demand for wage labour increased and became more rapid. But the process of accumulation was too slow to absorb the entire dispossessed labour force or the newly emerging wage labourers. A large part of what was called the “national product” and later advanced as capital was still going into the lives of the workers and was spent on their livelihood. With this process and the bloody beginning of the capitalist mode of production, the basis of all legislation and legislation was also to consolidate the foundations of the power of capital and the capitalist, to intensify the brutal exploitation of the worker and to further separate him from work and the results of his work and the process of determining the fate of his life. The Labor Code, which was passed with excessive insistence by the House of Commons, assumed the same role. A legal limit was placed on the rates of urban and rural wages, piecework, wages, and daily wages. Agricultural workers had to be hired annually, but in the case of urban workers, the market decided. Wages higher than the amount approved by law were prohibited and their receipt was subject to severe punishment. In the Elizabethan Code, the capitalist paying high wages was also sentenced to prison. Another code made the penalties heavier and gave the master craftsmen the authority to force workers to work longer hours each day through physical punishment. The law prohibited the creation of any association, alliance, contract, promise, or agreement among the working class and deemed it worthy of severe punishment. The government set a maximum wage but refused to declare any minimum.

The adoption and enforcement of such laws, accompanied by the cutting off of ears and noses, the branding and mutilation of workers, continued in the sixteenth century. This was a necessary, inevitable and compulsory condition for the dynamic development of capitalism. Although wages apparently rose, real wages continued to decline due to the rapid rise in prices. Queen Elizabeth’s Third Act forced the judges to legislate to block wage increases. James, I extended the same law to many more industries. George II made all manufacturers subject to anti-union laws. The widespread growth of the capitalist mode of production during the manufacturing era fueled the debate among capital owners that there was no need to pass legislation to impose low wages. The capitalist market, with its economic power of force, plays this role more crushingly and violently than any law, yet the rulers responsible for paving the way for the expansion of capitalist accumulation were not willing to give up resorting to the all-powerful lever of law. They insisted that all weapons should be used to lower wages. Accordingly, even the eighteenth century witnessed the widespread spread of this type of criminal and terrible bourgeois legislation. This situation continued until the capitalists began to regulate the affairs of factories by their own laws. This recent event, together with the drastic fall in the wages of agricultural workers to the lowest level, eliminated the need for the rulers to enact successive laws to reduce wages. The inhumane laws against trade unions were repealed in 1852 by the power of the working masses, although some of them remained. A few years later, the Liberal Party, riding the wave of workers’ illusions, ordered the judges to exhume the same criminal law against all forms of union and association of the working class and impose it on the labour movement.

The French bourgeoisie, observing the storm of workers’ struggles, began to abolish every right of the working class to unite and organize, and in a decree of June 14, 1791, it declared: “. the establishment of any kind of workers’ association is [a clear violation of freedom and the Declaration of Human Rights]!!! And it determined the penalty as 500 lire in cash, plus a year of complete deprivation of any kind of “civil rights”!!! “Le Chapelier,” the informant of the committee drafting and approving this law, says: “Even if we accept that the wage should be a little higher than it is, it should still be so low that the recipient is only saved from a state of absolute hunger and a life like slavery.”

4-How capitalist farmers emerged

We have examined the process of the emergence of the proletariat as a class exploited and deprived of rights in every respect, the bloody discipline, the state barbarity, the violent police violence and the shameful and shameful legislation that was the mechanism of its submission to wage slavery. We have also explained the emergence of the landowners, now we must analyse the emergence of the capitalist farmers.

The question is, where did these capitalists come from? The process of the development of this community is slow, but straightforward. When the serfs were freed, they found different economic positions, in England the first form of the farmer was the steward, who himself was once a serf. During the second half of the fourteenth century the steward gave way to the farmer, who received seeds, livestock and agricultural implements from the landowner. His position did not differ much from the peasant, except that the wage worker exploited more. In the next step he became a semi-farmer capitalist. This meant that part of the capital was provided by the landowner and the other part by himself. A kind of farm contract was established between them. Together they exploited a large number of wage workers and divided the produce among themselves. This form disappeared very quickly in England. Real farmers with capital took the place of the semi-farmers, and thus capitalists appeared who accumulated capital and increased their capital only through the exploitation of the working masses. The agricultural revolution of the last third of the fifteenth century and its continuation in the sixteenth century increased the wealth of the farmers with the same speed that it plunged the peasants into poverty. In the last century, the continuous decline in the value of precious metals and money led to a further decline in the wages of workers, events that, in total, made the volume of farmers’ capital gigantic. The daily increase in the price of grain, wool, meat and agricultural products made the money capital of farmers even more astronomical. Especially since they paid the rent for the land based on the same old contracts. In short, the capital of farmers increased due to the intensification of the exploitation of workers on the one hand and the simultaneous decrease in the profits of the landowners on the other. In this regard, England in the 16th century became the owner of a class of capitalist farmers.

5 – The impact of the agricultural revolution on industry, the formation of a domestic market for industrial capital

The dispossession and expulsion of the peasants provided a large mass of proletarians outside class relations for urban industries. As this population was uprooted from the land, their former means of subsistence were also freed, and these means became material elements of variable capital. The dispossessed peasant had to receive the value of his means of subsistence and necessities of life in the form of wages from the new master, the capitalist. The industrial raw materials, which continued to be obtained from agriculture, also became a fixed part of capital. Imagine for a moment that from among the vast mass of peasants who spin flax, a part of them were uprooted from the land and, under the pressure of economic coercion, were driven to the city. Those who remained as labourers became farm owners, and the drivers from the village were employed as wage labourers in the large textile factories. The appearance of the flax was the same as before. Even its fibres had not changed. But a social spirit of a different nature has breathed into it. Previously, small producers sowed it and each small producer, together with his family, spun a little of it; now it is part of the capitalist’s fixed capital. The capitalist does not spin; he forces others to spin. The surplus labour of the peasant, which was previously spent on spinning flax, became the surplus income of the peasant families, and of course a large part of it went to His Majesty’s treasury in the form of taxes. Now it has taken the form of the surplus labour of the worker and becomes the capitalist’s mass surplus value. The dispossession of the peasants and their forced expulsion not only created the wage labour needed by the industrial capitalist but also brought about the formation of a domestic market for capital. The peasant produced his own means of subsistence and the necessities of life. These means and necessities are now in the form of commodities in the possession of the owners of capital and are sold on the market. The destruction of the rural secondary industries led to the separation of manufacture from agriculture, and at the same time the peasant was also dispossessed and separated from his means of production. It was the destruction of the rural cottage industries that enabled the emergence of a stable and extensive domestic market for capitalism. However, let us not forget that the period of manufacture did not succeed in bringing this process to a precise and radical conclusion. Manufacture could not dominate the entire sphere of production and relied on urban handicraft industries and rural cottage industries. This has somewhat misled students of English history. From the last third of the fifteenth century, we witness the glory of some who speak of the development of capitalist agriculture in the rural areas and the ruin and destruction of the peasants, but at the same time we see that the peasants continue to exist, although in a much smaller number and in a much worse condition. The establishment of a solid foundation for capitalist agriculture was only possible through large-scale industry and the machine-built system. It is modern large-scale industry that dispossessed and expropriates the vast majority of the peasants, completes the separation of agriculture from rural cottage industries, and for the first time seizes the domestic market.

6 – The Origin of the Industrial Capitalist

The emergence of the industrial capitalist was different from what we saw in the case of the agricultural capitalist. There is no doubt that some craftsmen, artisans, craftsmen or even wage workers became capitalists, but the snail’s pace of this capitalisation did not match the trend of the expansion of the world capital market and the impact of scientific and technical discoveries on this market. Since the middle centuries of our history, we have witnessed the existence of two types of capital, usurious and commercial. The feudal structure of the village and the craft and guild organization of the cities prevented the conversion of money capital obtained from usury and trade into industrial capital. These obstacles were removed with the dissolution of feudal serfdom and the dispossession of the peasants. New manufacturers began to be established and grow in ports and coastal cities or in rural areas outside the control of the urban communes. The discovery of gold and silver in America, the enslavement of the natives and their burial in mines, the conquest of the East Indies and their plundering, the transformation of the African continent into a speculative stronghold for hunting blacks, were the measures by which capitalism passed the period of initial accumulation and ignited the fire of commercial war between European countries all over the world. The Dutch War against Spain, the Anti-Jacobin War of England against France, the Opium War against China and many other wars that flared up one after the other and burned humanity. The different periods of primitive accumulation can be analysed according to their chronological sequence in Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, France and England. This period in England at the end of the 17th century was combined with a combination of colonialism, state debt, a new tax system and a customs protection system. A combination that was the most brutal wars, the bloodiest disasters and the darkest curtains of Malal atrocities. The use of naked violence and Holocaust-making in the field of colonialism is part of the dirtiest records of the history of the bourgeoisie. The exercise of state power or organized police, military and security violence at the level of society was also everywhere and in all countries the weapon of the bourgeoisie to further accelerate the development of capitalism and the transition from the feudal system. Violence is an economic power and a midwife present at the bedside of every old society to give birth to a new society. But this violence and this economic power in the role of the midwife of the birth of capitalism created the most horrific, corrupt, inhuman and criminal scenes that history had no memory of and no language or pen is able to describe. The brutal hunting of human beings for sale as slaves in the world trade market by the Dutch, the barbarians, the systematic plundering, pillaging and massacres by the English capitalists, the British government and the East India Company in South Asia, the legislation of the New England Puritans setting a bounty for the scalp of every native black man, every Indian, every person over twelve years of age, every captive man, every captive woman and child inhabiting the Caribbean countries, or the endless list of these crimes is beyond description. The midwife of capitalism performed her midwife role with these weapons, these forces and these powers. Thus, was born the system of wage slavery. The colonies provided a market for the growing manufacturers and caused a vast increase in the accumulation of capital. Capital that, through the monopoly of the entire production of the countries and continents of the colonial sphere, through the rampant plunder of the entire peasantry and small producers of these spheres, went to the colonial capitalists of the metropolitan societies. These windfall treasures and plundered galactic riches were deposited in the form of capital in European societies and brought about the greatest prosperity of capital accumulation. Holland is the first country to develop the colonial system to its peak. In this regard, it witnessed the greatest growth in the field of shipping and industry and let us not forget the fact that the workers of Holland were hungrier, more helpless and more miserable than anywhere else in Europe during this very period and on top of this golden rise of industry and colonialism.

The public credit system or national debt was another lever that, along with colonial policy, maritime trade, and trade wars, heated up the market for the initial accumulation of capital. The way it worked was that the government, whether autocratic, constitutional monarchy, or republic, became indebted to brokers, traders, contractors, and other money market players by selling securities. The government’s debt was the debt of the masses, and they had to pay it, but the lenders held their money in the form of securities and did whatever they wanted with it. The national debt was one of the most powerful levers for the initial accumulation of capital. It transformed unproductive money into a productive blow and into capital. The credit system simultaneously gave rise to joint-stock companies, various types of securities transactions, speculation, banking, and finally a gambling den called the stock market. The great banks were nothing more than private speculative associations at the beginning. They placed money at the disposal of governments thanks to the government privileges they received. The more the national debt increased, the more gigantic the capital of these banks became. In Britain, these banks reached their most developed stage with the establishment of the Bank of England in 1694. This bank began its work by lending to the government at 8% interest, received from Parliament the authority to print banknotes and was allowed to use these banknotes to discount promissory notes, grant commercial credit and purchase precious metals. Very quickly, the paper money created by the bank acquired the status of coinage and the bank made loans to the government. It paid interest on the bonds on behalf of the government. The bank gave with one hand and with the other took back not only what it had given but also made the mass of the population forever indebted to it, rial for rial, for the loans it had paid. A large part of the capital which today, without any birth certificate or stamp of birth, is engaged in the brutal exploitation of workers in the United States, has been boiled and grown from the blood of English children in jars.

The modern tax system was born as a necessary complement to the national debt system. The government needed money to pay its debts, and this money had to be extracted by taxing the food, housing, clothing, and livelihood of the working people. The tax system made the working masses even more deeply in debt than before, but what is emphasized here is the role it played, especially in intensifying and expanding the uprooting of the peasants from the land, their migration to the cities, and their transformation into wage slaves. The levers of intensification of the process of primitive accumulation came into play one after another and complemented each other. The tariff system was another of these levers. The mechanism that limited the import of foreign goods by imposing duties on them in favour of domestic production encouraged exports and, in general, led to a greater accumulation of capital. In short, the colonial system with all its terrifying consequences, government loans, heavy taxes, customs protection, trade wars and similar strategies, brought the era of early capital accumulation to its destination. In the midst of this process and along with the development of capitalist production, European public opinion purged itself of the last remaining traces of shame, conscience, honour, and humanity. These were the other beliefs, thoughts, ethics, values, and convictions of the bourgeoisie that bore the stamp of nationhood and nationality on their foreheads. Culture, thoughts, and values ​​that were inhumane in their entire fabric and had no sign of any human temperament or honour on their foreheads. Its historians proudly boasted that their great motherland, in the “Peace of Utrecht” and the Treaty of Asinto, had wrested the privileges of the slave trade from Spain throughout the region between Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America!! While the cotton spinning industry was promoting the bloody slavery of children in England, the dynasty was instrumental in replacing the patriarchal slavery system in America with the even more disastrous commercial slavery.

Capitalism was born in this way and, having gone through all these crimes, holocausts, atrocities and wars, finally established itself, transforming the means of production and livelihood into capital at one pole and transforming the masses of people into wage labourers and the toiling poor at the other pole. If, as Auger said, money was born with a face full of natural blood, capital is born in a place where blood and filth ooze from head to toe and from every pore.

7 – The historical tendency of capitalist accumulation

The expropriation of the direct producers was accomplished by resorting to the cruellest barbarities and the most abominable crimes. Private property based on individual labour gave way to capitalist private property. When the producers, the proletariat, and the means of labour became capital, when the capitalist mode of production stood on its own feet, then the real socialization of labour and the means of production depended on a fortunate, historical, and entirely new phase of expropriation. Now it is no longer the worker but only the capitalist who must be the object of expropriation and dispossession. But here lies a very great historical secret that must be revealed and retold. The problem is not at all simply the expropriation of the capitalist. This type of expropriation is carried out and continues to be carried out by capital itself, in the process of capitalist expansion and in the process of the increasing concentration of the social capital of countries or of the entire world capital. The history of capitalism has been intertwined with this type of expropriation from the beginning and has not been separated from it for a minute. As soon as capital was established, it began and expanded the process of expropriation of individual and separate owners. Small individual ownerships gave way to large corporations, smaller capitals merged into larger partners or competitors, trusts grew, cartels emerged, governments became giant owners of capital, the stock market entered the scene. Let us leave aside all this, during the twentieth century there were revolutions, the victors of these revolutions gathered the individual property of capitalists. They called themselves the proletarian state, they placed the entire social capital of the country under the ownership and control of the state power. All these events happened one after the other, but with the occurrence of all of them, not only was there no scratch anywhere on the wall of ownership, power and sovereignty of capital, but capitalism, the ownership of the capitalist class, the tower of power of this system, the pressure of exploitation of the workers of the world, the dimensions of poverty, misery, hunger, homelessness, the workers’ tongue and their separation from the fate of their work and production and life, became much more explosive, terrible, deeper and more terrible. There is only one way to eliminate capitalist property, and it is necessary to completely crush the foundation of the existence of capital and the basis of capitalization of the products of human labour and production and erase it from the page of history. The relationship of buying and selling labour must be consigned to the swamp of history, the foundation of wage labour must be destroyed. The way to do this is not to beat the drum of seizing political power, nor to overthrow the official government of capital and place this party and that government on the throne of power, but to establish a Soviet, nationwide, and solid movement composed of the working masses, to abolish wage labour, and to abolish every form of government. A movement must be established that will play the role of a new, rising force in history in the darkness of the domination of the old system. A proletarian movement that combines the foundation of its ongoing daily struggle against exploitation, against all the effects and consequences of capitalist domination, with an attack on the foundations of the existence of capital. In the struggle for the improvement of living, working conditions, education and health care, human rights and freedoms, against gender discrimination, environmental pollution, in all areas of social life, it will see the way to realize its demands in the exercise of organized Soviet and class power against capital. It is only this movement that, if it grows and gains strength, will forever abolish the basis of capital’s existence and thus capitalist property, and will loudly proclaim:

“The flower is here; this is the place to dance”

Chapter Twenty-Five: The New Theory of Colonialism

Political economy, based on its tenets, mixes two different types of private property, one based on one’s own labour and the other based on the exploitation of others. These two are opposites. In Western Europe, the process of primitive accumulation of capital has reached its conclusion. The capitalist system has either brought the entire cycle of production under its control or at least has indirect control over the social strata that inherit the old modes of production. In the colonies, the situation is different. There, capitalism constantly encounters an obstacle that the independent producer places in its way. The contradiction between the two is evident in the struggle that is going on between them. Where the foreign capitalist has the power of the mother country behind him, he tries to remove the mode of production and property based on the personal labour of the producer by force.

The means of production and necessities are not capital as long as they are in the possession of the immediate producer. These means become capital only when they assume the role of instruments of exploitation of the worker and domination over him. The capitalist mode of production is based on the expropriation of the land from the peasantry and independent producers. The nature of the mode of production in a “free” colony, on the contrary, is based on the ownership of the land by individuals. Here, each settler who settles can seize a piece of land without obstructing the next settler from owning another piece of land. The secret of the progress and prosperity of the colonies on the one hand and their decline and backwardness on the other lies precisely in this. Where land is cheap and anyone can own a plot of land, not only is the producer’s share of the product very high, but it is also quite difficult to find compound labour. In the colonies, the separation of the worker from the means of labour and the necessities of life, from the land and the necessities of life has not yet occurred. Wherever it has occurred, it is limited and scattered. In the same vein, we do not witness the separation of agriculture from industry. None of the household industries have declined or been destroyed. The question is, then, where will the domestic market come from? No part of the American people are only farmers, but slaves and their employers, who in certain areas have combined capital and labour. People still make their own household utensils and furniture. They build their own dwellings. In many places they produce their own candles, soap, shoes, clothing, and other necessities. Cultivating the land is often the second occupation of the blacksmith, miller, and shopkeeper.

Capitalist production not only constantly reproduces the worker as a wage worker, but also creates a relative surplus of workers in proportion to the growth of accumulation, regulates the law of supply and demand for labour power on the basis of imposing maximum pressure on the worker to sell his labour power at the lowest price, adjusts the fluctuations of wages to the brutal intensification of the exploitation of labour power, and finally guarantees the social dependence of the worker on the capitalist, which is the inevitable and coercive necessity of this mode of production. Political economy in its homeland, by absurdly inverting this absolute dependence based on criminal economic force, proclaims the free contract between the seller and buyer of labour power!! But in the colonies of the dish, the scandal falls from the roof, because there the labour market is suffering from a shortage of workers, the capitalist law of supply and demand for labour is powerless to control, such is the situation and in the context of this situation, on the one hand, the old world, the old world, is injecting ever more terrible exploitation into the new world, and on the other hand, the regular reproduction of the worker in the form of wage labour faces obstacles and barriers. Obstacles that cannot be easily overcome, there is no relative surplus of workers, the dispossession of small producers has not progressed, even the wage worker may work for himself tomorrow and all this is an obstacle to the absolute dependence of the worker on the “restrained” and “pious” capitalist! This is also the very liberating, deadly and incurable pain of famous theorists!! like “Wakefield”. They cry out with indescribable stupidity, that:

“Here, the supply of wage labour is not continuous, it is not regular, the supply and demand of labour are not regulated. What misfortune can a capitalist who loves the development of the world and is fascinated by civilization bring upon himself to remove this problem?! Many times, he has hired workers from his ancestral homeland and taken them to these lands, but even these hired labourers, once they have entered there, have not lasted a day and have gone their own way, and the story remains.”

Wakefield speaks of this “wretched state”!!! And he is looking for a solution for the bloodthirsty capitalist who loves prosperity, industry, civilization and progress!!! Of course, while composing his delusions, he is forced to cite facts here and there. He says that the condition of the American peasant, craftsman and independent producer in the same darkness deprived of the rays of the capitalist sun!! is hundreds of times better than that of the English and European wage worker in general, and therefore it is not surprising and astonishing why they do not fall in love with wage labour. But really, how the deadly and infectious cancer of the Wakefield’s will be cured and when and how the colonies will fall on the golden road of development of capital accumulation is a matter that history must teach them, and what happened in the United States was a clear example of this teaching.  Today, on the one hand, a vast flood of people is pouring onto the shores of America, who have no choice but to sell their labour power. On the other hand, the American Civil War has made the state’s debt terrifying. The government has burdened these debts on the shoulders of the peasants and independent producers with ironclad tax laws. At the same time, a financial aristocracy, brokers, plunderers, scoundrels, and speculators, has emerged from the lap of events, and has given away vast tracts of land to monopolists for the construction of railroads and the exploitation of mines and the like. The Civil War has brought about the rapid accumulation and concentration of capital. The Great Republic is no longer the promised land of immigrant workers; capitalist production is advancing in it by gigantic leaps. It is true that the decline in wages and the dependence of wage workers on capital has not yet progressed to the level of Europe, but it should not be overlooked that the heinous and shameless act of the British government in donating waste lands in the colonies to the aristocracy and capitalists, especially in Australia, the process of the collapse of the work and livelihood of the colonial industrialists and craftsmen under the pressure of the competitive power of cheap English goods, the wave of emigration of those in search of gold, etc., has paved the way for the emergence of a relative surplus labour population. The news of the concentration of unemployed people in Australia and prostitutes in London parks also screams the same reality. Our discussion here, however, is not a description of the current situation in the colonies. We wanted to tell the watchmen of political economy that the fundamental condition for the emergence and development of the capitalist mode of production and capitalist private property is the destruction of private property based on the personal labour of individuals and the dispossession of independent producers.

This was a rereading of the first volume of Marx’s Capital.