

In a slave society, it is
directly appropriated by the slave owner. In a feudal society it is
appropriated, in whole or in part, by the feudal ruling class, the
landlords and clergy in the form of rents, tithes and taxes on the
peasant. But, the peasant or artisan, may retain ownership of part,
which is one means by which they may transform themselves into
capitalists.
Under capitalism, however,
the whole of this surplus is appropriated by capital in the form of
surplus value.

So, a given proportion of
society's output must also be devoted to producing those goods which
ensure the reproduction of the producers. Again, how much
labour-time will depend on the level of productivity. The higher the
level of productivity, the less time has to be allocated to this
purpose. As seen earlier, this is why capital has an incentive in
raising productivity, because it means a proportionately smaller
amount of society's labour-time has to be devoted to reproducing
labour-power, which leaves a greater proportion of labour-time left
over as surplus.

In reality, the same
underlying relations exist. The producers/workers spend a given
amount of available labour-time reproducing the means of production.
They spend a given amount of labour-time producing those necessaries
required for their own reproduction. The available labour-time
remaining produces the surplus.

Variable capital is therefore only a particular
historical form of appearance of the fund for providing the
necessaries of life, or the labour-fund which the labourer requires
for the maintenance of himself and family, and which, whatever be the
system of social production, he must himself produce and reproduce.
If the labour-fund constantly flows to him in the form of money that
pays for his labour, it is because the product he has created moves
constantly away from him in the form of capital.”(p 542-3)
Marx removes the illusion
created by commodity fetishism by analysing the operation of the Law
of Value in terms of the peasant producer.
“Let us take a peasant liable to
do compulsory service for his lord. He works on his own land, with
his own means of production, for, say, 3 days a week. The 3 other
days he does forced work on the lord’s domain. He constantly
reproduces his own labour-fund, which never, in his case, takes the
form of a money payment for his labour, advanced by another person.
But in return, his unpaid forced labour for the lord, on its side,
never acquires the character of voluntary paid labour. If one fine
morning the lord appropriates to himself the land, the cattle, the
seed, in a word, the, means of production of this peasant, the latter
will thenceforth be obliged to sell his labour-power to the lord. He
will, ceteris paribus, labour 6 days a week as
before, 3 for himself, 3 for his lord, who thenceforth becomes a
wages-paying capitalist. As before, he will use up the means of
production as means of production, and transfer their value to the
product. As before, a definite portion of the product will be devoted
to reproduction. But from the moment that the forced labour is
changed into wage labour, from that moment the labour-fund, which the
peasant himself continues as before to produce and reproduce, takes
the form of a capital advanced in the form of wages by the lord. The
bourgeois economist whose narrow mind is unable to separate the form
of appearance from the thing that appears, shuts his eyes to the
fact, that it is but here and there on the face of the earth, that
even nowadays the labour fund crops up in the form of capital.” (p
537)
Although today workers are
for the first time the largest class on the planet, a very large part
of the labour fund continues to be in the form of direct production
and consumption by peasant producers, rather than in wages.
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