What is it that takes place in the exchange between the capitalist and the wage-labor?
The laborer receives means of subsistence in exchange for his labor-power;the capitalist receives, in exchange for his means of subsistence, labor, the productive activity of the laborer, the creative force by which the worker not only replaces what he consumes, but also gives to the accumulated labor a greater value than it previously possessed.The laborer gets from the capitalist a portion of the existing means of subsistence.For what purpose do these means of subsistence serve him? For immediate consumption.
But as soon as I consume means of subsistence, they are irrevocably lost to me, unless I employ the time during which these means sustain my life in producing new means of subsistence, in creating by my labor new values in place of the values lost in consumption.But it is just this noble reproductive power that the laborer surrenders to the capitalist in exchange for means of subsistence received.Consequently, he has lost it for himself.
Let us take an example.For one shilling a laborer works all day long in the fields of a farmer, to whom he thus secures a return of two shillings.
The farmer not only receives the replaced value which he has given to the day laborer, he has doubled it.Therefore, he has consumed the one shilling that he gave to the day laborer in a fruitful, productive manner.For the one shilling he has bought the labor-power of the day-laborer, which creates products of the soil of twice the value, and out of one shilling makes two.The day-laborer, on the contrary, receives in the place of his productive force, whose results he has just surrendered to the farmer, one shilling, which he exchanges for means of subsistence, which he consumes more or less quickly.The one shilling has therefore been consumed in a double manner -- reproductively for the capitalist, for it has been exchanged for labor-power, which brought forth two shillings; unproductively for the worker, for it has been exchanged for means of subsistence which are lost for ever, and whose value he can obtain again only by repeating the same exchange with the farmer.Capital therefore presupposes wage-labor;wage-labor presupposes capital.They condition each other; each brings the other into existence.
Does a worker in a cotton factory produce only cotton? No.He produces capital.He produces values which serve anew to command his work and to create by means of it new values.
Capital can multiply itself only by exchanging itself for labor-power, by calling wage-labor into life.The labor-power of the wage-laborer can exchange itself for capital only by increasing capital, by strengthening that very power whose slave it is.Increase of capital, therefore, is increase of the proletariat, i.e., of the working class.
And so, the bourgeoisie and its economists maintain that the interest of the capitalist and of the laborer is the same.And in fact, so they are! The worker perishes if capital does not keep him busy.Capital perishes if it does not exploit labor-power, which, in order to exploit, it must buy.The more quickly the capital destined for production -- the productive capital -- increases, the more prosperous industry is, the more the bourgeoisie enriches itself, the better business gets, so many more workers does the capitalist need, so much the dearer does the worker sell himself.The fastest possible growth of productive capital is, therefore, the indispensable condition for a tolerable life to the laborer.
But what is growth of productive capital? Growth of the power of accumulated labor over living labor; growth of the rule of the bourgeoisie over the working class.When wage-labor produces the alien wealth dominating it, the power hostile to it, capital, there flow back to it its means of employment -- i.e., its means of subsistence, under the condition that it again become a part of capital, that is become again the lever whereby capital is to be forced into an accelerated expansive movement.
To say that the interests of capital and the interests of the workers are identical, signifies only this: that capital and wage-labor are two sides of one and the same relation.The one conditions the other in the same way that the usurer and the borrower condition each other.
As long as the wage-laborer remains a wage-laborer, his lost is dependent upon capital.That is what the boasted community of interests between worker and capitalists amounts to.
