Capital Volume 1: Class 10

Readings: Capital I, ch. 23, 24

In these chapters, Marx lays out the concepts of reproduction and accumulation. It is helpful to read them together because the two processes are deeply related, or perhaps two sides of the same phenomenon. Reproduction refers to how the capitalist system is sustained. Accumulation refers to the way in which it expands.

While Marx differentiates these concepts as separate processes, I do not know to what extent this differentiation refers to a concrete difference or an ideal difference. In other words, has there ever been a moment in capitalist history when reproduction has not also involved accumulation? This could be similar to his explanation of absolute and relative surplus value. In fully developed capitalism, both are employed in different degrees, but the latter was less applicable to early capitalism, which lacked large-scale machine production. Similarly, perhaps simple reproduction is a phenomenon of early capitalism, which then mutates into accumulation during mature capitalism.

The closest Marx comes to defining reproduction is the following from the opening of chapter 23: “No society can go on producing, in other words no society can reproduce, unless it constantly reconverts a part of its products into means of production, or elements of fresh products. All other circumstances remaining the same, the society can reproduce or maintain its wealth on the existing scale only by replacing the means of production which have been used up—i.e. the instruments of labour, the raw material and the auxiliary substances—with an equal quantity of new articles.” (711) First, I emphasized a few words in the above quote to show the limited application of this definition. Marx is talking here of reproduction and maintenance of existing wealth by applying an equal quantity of capital. There is no mention of expansion. This is why I think Marx is describing an ideal state, since the history of capitalism shows that it is always expanding. Second, this definition is strictly economic, referring to wealth, products and new articles. But he deepens this analysis later.

Marx elaborates at the end of chapter 23: “The capitalist process of production, therefore, seen as a total, connected process, i.e. a process of reproduction, produces not only commodities, not only surplus-value, but it also produces and reproduces the capital-relation itself; on the one hand the capitalist, on the other the wage-labourer.” (724) Here we get a bit more: this is not just a disembodied economic process as described before, where the system needs an equal amount of inputs to continue to produce outputs, but it is also the reproduction of the actual relations of production, the power structure of the capitalist system. The use of wages for consumption only reproduces the worker as a cog in the capitalist machine, as a tool for the capitalist to obtain more surplus value. Wages do not reproduce the worker as a free individual who can control his own destiny or the surplus product that is rightfully his. Once the worker spends his meager wages on his means of subsistence, the money goes back to the capitalist, which forces the worker back into the labor market. This perpetuates the cycle of exploitation.

In the following chapter, Marx defines accumulation as follows: “Looked at concretely, accumulation can be resolved into the production of capital on a progressively increasing scale. The cycle of simple reproduction alters its form and, to use Sismondi’s expression, changes into a spiral.” (727) So, rather than a feedback circle where the surplus value appropriated by the capitalist gets divided into revenue for himself and wages for the workers, accumulation is a spiral where surplus value becomes capital, which is reinvested on a large scale into expanded production, yielding greater surplus value for the capitalist.

This is not an individual choice by the capitalist, but rather his social role: “Moreover, the development of capitalist production makes it necessary constantly to increase the amount of capital laid out in a given industrial undertaking, and competition subordinates every individual capitalist to the immanent laws of capitalist production as external and coercive laws. It compels him to keep extending his capital, so as to preserve it, and he can only extend it by means of progressive accumulation.” (739) It is the logic of competition that forces all capitalists to accumulate capital for the purpose of expanding production. If they do not do this, they will be overtaken and eaten up by capitalists who do.

Finally, Marx makes an additional point about reproduction not only of economics, but of the relations of production, as described in chapter 23 with regard to labor. In this case, he argues that the capitalist’s property allows him to reproduce his role as exploiter: “Now, however, property turns out to be the right, on the part of the capitalist, to appropriate the unpaid labour of others or its product, and the impossibility, on the part of the worker, of appropriating his own product.” (730) Just as wages reproduce the working class by forcing workers back onto the labor market, private property juridically reproduces the capitalist class by giving capitalists the right to exploit labor. I would add that this aspect of reproduction shows the power of the capitalist state in sustaining the system of exploitation, as it upholds property rights.