Marx opens Part VII by pausing at one turn of the wheel. Money buys machines, materials and labour-power, the factory makes commodities worth more than they cost, and the capitalist sells them and buys again. Then he asks what happens when that circuit simply repeats. A society can no more stop producing than stop consuming, so production is always reproduction, and capitalist production reproduces capital. Suppose £100 becomes capital and earns £20, and the £20 is spent each year on the capitalist's own living. That is simple reproduction, the same scale again. Even so, repetition changes how the wage looks. The worker is paid after he has worked, so his wage comes out of a product he has already made. It is last week's labour that pays for this week's labour-power. Seen across the whole class, the capitalists hand out money order-notes on the workers' own product, and the workers hand them straight back.
Marx makes the point with a peasant who owes his lord three days of forced labour a week and works three for himself. Let the lord seize his land, cattle and seed. The peasant still works six days, three for himself and three for the lord, but now he sells his labour-power and the lord has become a wage-paying capitalist. The fund that keeps the peasant alive is the same, yet it now looks like capital advanced to him. Then comes the arithmetic that undoes the capitalist's belief that he began with savings of his own. If £1,000 earns £200 a year and the £200 is consumed, the original £1,000 is eaten up in five years, or in ten if only half is spent. After that, everything he owns is surplus-value taken without payment. "Not a single atom of the value of his old capital continues to exist." Even a fortune first earned by its owner's own work ends as the unpaid labour of others.
The same repetition reproduces the people on each side. The worker leaves the process as he entered it, a source of wealth with no means of making that wealth his own. What he makes returns as capital, an alien power that commands him, and the capitalist produces him again as a wage labourer. Marx separates the worker's two kinds of consumption. Using materials at work is productive consumption. The food and shelter he buys with his wage is individual consumption, and it serves capital too, because it renews labour-power, as cleaning keeps a machine in order. The capitalist can leave this to the worker's instincts of self-preservation and of having children, and wants it cut back to what is strictly necessary. The Roman slave was held by fetters, Marx says, while the wage labourer is held by invisible threads: a changing line of employers and the legal fiction of a contract.
Then comes proof from Lancashire. When the American Civil War brought a cotton famine in 1863, most of the mill operatives were thrown out of work, and calls rose to help them emigrate. Edmund Potter, a former president of the Manchester Chamber of Commerce, wrote to The Times that the workers were not property, but were the strength of the trade and could not be replaced for a generation. He spoke of keeping the machinery in order, meaning the living kind. The Times answered that he would shut half a million people and their 700,000 dependants in a "moral workhouse". Yet public opinion sided with Potter, Marx notes. Emigration was blocked and the operatives stayed locked in the cotton districts. This process, he concludes, hurls the labourer back on the market again and again, so that he belongs to capital before he has sold himself. Each cycle produces more than commodities and surplus-value. It produces the capitalist relation itself.
Coming Up in Chapter 24
Marx now follows a master spinner with £10,000 of capital. Four fifths go on cotton and machinery, one fifth on wages, and a year of yarn is worth £12,000. The leftover £2,000 is plain money, with no trace of surplus-value to smell or see. How does it become new capital, with more cotton and extra spinners? Marx begins the old story of Abraham begetting Isaac.
