Karl Marx: A biography by David McLellan

THE 'ECONOMICS' 3'17 4

his life-time into working-time, and drag his wife and child beneath

the wheels of the Juggernaut of capital. But all methods for the pro-

duction of surplus-value are at the same time methods of accumulation;

and every extension of accumulation becomes again a means for the

development of those methods. It follows therefore that in proportion

as capital accumulates, the lot of the labourer, be his payment high or

low, must grow worse. The law, finally, that always equilibrates the the

relative surplus-population, or industrial reserve army, to the extent and

energy of accumulation, this law rivets the labourer to capital more

firmly than the wedges of Vulcan did Prometheus to the rock. It

establishes an accumulation of misery, corresponding with accumulation

of capital. Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same

time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality,

mental degradation, at the opposite pole, i.e., on the side of the class

that produces its own product in the form of capital.^202

This judgement was supported by a series of detailed studies, moving yet

objective, on the condition of the British working classes over the previous

twenty years, the British agricultural proletariat, and the misery of Ireland.

The book was rounded off with the following famous passage:

Along with the constandy diminishing number of the magnates of

capital, who usurp and monopolise all advantages of this process

of transformation, grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery,

degradation, exploitation; but with this too grows the revolt of the

working class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined,

united, organised by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist

production itself. The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the

mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with,

and under it. Centralisation of the means of production and socialisation

of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with

their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell

of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expro-

priated.^205

The subsequent two volumes, being only in draft form, have none of
the polished verve of Volume One. There was, however, a long chapter
entitled 'Results of the Immediate Process of Production' that Marx seems
to have intended to put at the end of Volume One but left out at the
last minute.^204 In this chapter Marx discussed how capitalist production
reproduced the relationship of capitalist to worker in the total process.
There are particularly interesting comments on the alienation involved
in the relationship of capitalist to worker^205 and on the tendency of
capitalism to 'reduce as much as possible the number of those working
for a wage' in the production sphere and increase the number of workers
in purely service industries.^206