Chapter 15 Exposition of the Internal Contradictions of the Law

I. General We have seen in the first part of this book that the rate of profit expresses the rate of surplus-value always lower than it actually is. We have just seen that even a rising rate of surplus-value has a tendency to express itself...

Chapter 9 Formation of a General Rate of Profit (Average Rate of Profit) and Transformation of The Values of Commodities into Prices of Production

The organic composition of capital depends at any given time on two circumstances: first, on the technical relation of labour-power employed to the mass of the means of production employed; secondly, on the price of these means of production. This composition, as we have...

From Results of the Immediate Process of Production

From RESULTS OF THE IMMEDIATE PROCESS OF PRODUCTION Alienation in the Productive Process … But everything is changed when we examine the process of valorization. Here it is not the worker who uses the means of production, but the means of production which...

Chapter 14 Division of Labour and Manufacture

Section 1. Two-Fold Origin of Manufacture That co-operation which is based on division of labour, assumes its typical form in manufacture, and is the prevalent characteristic form of the capitalist process of production throughout the manufacturing period properly so called. That period, roughly speaking, extends...

Chapter 13 Co-Operation

Capitalist production only then really begins, as we have already seen, when each individual capital employs simultaneously a comparatively large number of labourers; when consequently the labour-process is carried on on an extensive scale and yields, relatively, large quantities of products. A greater number...

Chapter 11 Rate and Mass of Surplus-Value

In this chapter, as hitherto, the value of labour-power, and therefore the part of the working-day necessary for the reproduction or maintenance of that labour-power, are supposed to be given, constant magnitudes. This premised, with the rate, the mass is at the same time given...

Chapter 8 Constant Capital and Variable Capital

The various factors of the labour-process play different parts in forming the value of the product. The labourer adds fresh value to the subject of his labour by expending upon it a given amount of additional labour, no matter what the specific character and utility...

Chapter 7 The Labour-Process and the Process of Producing Surplus-Value

Section 1. The Labour-Process or the Production of Use-Values The capitalist buys labour-power in order to use it; and labour-power in use is labour itself. The purchaser of labour-power consumes it by setting the seller of it to work. By working, the latter becomes actually,...

Chapter 4 The General Formula for Capital

The circulation of commodities is the starting-point of capital. The production of commodities, their circulation, and that more developed form of their circulation called commerce, these form the historical ground-work from which it rises. The modern history of capital dates from the creation in...

Chapter 2 Exchange

It is plain that commodities cannot go to market and make exchanges of their own account. We must, therefore, have recourse to their guardians, who are also their owners. Commodities are things, and therefore without power of resistance against man. If they are wanting...