Das Kapital

Part VII — The Accumulation of Capital — begins with the simplest possible case: a capitalist who consumes all surplus-value as personal revenue and reinvests only enough to keep production running at exactly the same scale. No growth. Simple reproduction. Even this minimal scenario, when examined over time, reveals the true character of the capitalist relation. At first glance, the capitalist advances their own capital, production proceeds, wages are paid from that capital, and surplus-value returns to the capitalist. But over repeated cycles, the original capital has long since been recovered and exceeded. The capital currently in use — the machines, the raw materials, the wage fund — was entirely produced by workers in previous rounds, appropriated as surplus-value, and reinvested. The capitalist's original advance has been paid back many times over. What they now command is not their own past savings but past unpaid labour. The worker's wages appear to be paid from the capitalist's pocket. But the money the capitalist uses to pay wages was itself the product of last cycle's labour. Workers are, in effect, paid with a portion of their own previous output. The wage is not a gift from capital to labour but a means by which labour reproduces the conditions of its own continued exploitation. Simple reproduction also shows that the capital relation is not a once-off transaction but a perpetually renewed social relation. At the end of each cycle, the capitalist still owns the means of production and the worker still owns only their labour-power. Both sides are reproduced — as classes — by the very process that appears only to produce commodities. Marx notes a parallel to feudal corvée: the split between necessary and surplus labour is identical. Under feudalism the division is transparent; the serf knows which days are theirs and which belong to the lord. Under wages, the same division is invisible, fused into the apparent uniformity of the working day.