Marx begins with one spinner. He advances £10,000, £8,000 of it for cotton and machinery and £2,000 for wages. His year's yarn is worth £12,000, so the surplus is 40,000 lbs of yarn, worth £2,000, and once it is sold it is simply money. 'We can neither see nor smell' in it a trace of surplus-value. To make it capital, the spinner spends four-fifths of it, £1,600, on more cotton and the rest, £400, on extra spinners, and the new capital brings in a further £400. He can buy that cotton only because it already exists in the year's total product, which the market merely moves from hand to hand. That £400 is turned into capital in its turn and brings in £80, and so the ball rolls on. Marx calls this accumulation: employing surplus-value as capital. Simple reproduction moved in a circle. Now the circle becomes a spiral.
Where do the materials for this growth come from? Only from the surplus-product itself, which must already hold extra means of production and subsistence. The extra hands come from a working class kept dependent on wages that cover its increase. Then Marx asks where the first £10,000 came from. Political economy answers 'by his own labour and that of his forefathers'. For the £2,000 there is no such tale, because not one atom of its value owes its existence to anything but unpaid labour. The spinner may pay his new hands the full price, but that is the old dodge of the conqueror who buys goods from the conquered with money he has robbed them of. He may even turn the new capital into a machine that throws out the workers who made it and replaces them with a few children. The £400 needed only the £2,000 before it. The ownership of past unpaid labour is from then on the sole condition for taking living unpaid labour on a growing scale, and the more the capitalist has accumulated, the more he is able to accumulate.
Yet every step obeys the laws of exchange. The worker sells his labour-power and receives its full value. The product belongs to the buyer. The surplus-value costs the worker labour and the capitalist nothing, but the worker has not been cheated, because the law asks only for equal exchange-values and says nothing about how the purchase is then used. Simple reproduction merely repeats this operation, and accumulation repeats it on a larger scale. Marx states the result: the exchange of equivalents has turned into its opposite. The capital that is exchanged for labour-power is itself part of others' product taken without an equivalent, and it must be replaced with something added. At first, property seemed to rest on a man's own labour. Now it is the capitalist's right to unpaid labour and the worker's impossibility of owning his own product. Seen one deal at a time, worker B, paid out of what worker A produced, has no complaint, and the capital keeps 'its original virginity'. Capitalist appropriation comes from applying the laws of commodity production, Marx says, not from breaking them. The classical economists then err in another way. Adam Smith and Ricardo say that all surplus-value turned into capital is spent on wages, but it splits like the original capital, into means of production and labour-power, and Smith's proof rests on the words 'and so on'.
