In considering the primary accumulation of capital, it cannot involve an increase, or a building up, of a stock of means of subsistence, because the labourers, as labourers, always required such means of subsistence to exist. The same is true of the materials and other means of production required by the labourers. What Marx is dealing with here is the question he dealt with in Capital II, in relation to Adam Smith's view that a productive-supply only comes into existence with the division of labour under capitalism. But, Marx showed, there, why this is wrong. The division of labour predates commodity production, let alone capitalism. For any production, the producers must have a supply at hand, not only of means of subsistence, to sustain them until their current production is available for consumption, but also a supply of materials etc., so as to be able to undertake that current production.
What the primary accumulation involves is not an increase in the total available stock of these commodities – in fact, as Marx demonstrates, in Capital II, these stocks may be actually proportionally smaller, compared to total output – but their concentration at particular points. In other words, a thousand peasant producers might each have their own stock of food able to sustain them for a week or so, as well as their small stock of wool or flax that they gradually spin and weave into cloth. If 20 labourers now work, only weaving yarn into cloth, whilst 20 more work only spinning yarn, 20 more producing machines, and so on, whilst the rest no longer engage in those activities, but confine themselves to agriculture, it may not be necessary to have any greater quantities of food, flax, wool and so on, but, as the 20 workers who now produce yarn are the only ones who do so, the productive supply of wool and flax must be concentrated in their possession, rather than that of 1,000 individual peasant producers, in their cottages, and the same applies to the yarn and so on.
“Not an increase in absolute terms is presupposed, but concentration, the gathering together of more at a given point, and of relatively more [means of labour] compared with the numbers of workers brought together there. More flax, for example, [is used] by the workers in manufacture (in proportion to their numbers) than the relative amount of flax required in proportion to all the peasants—both men and women—who used to spin flax as a sideline. Hence, conglomeration of workers, concentration of raw materials, instruments, and means of subsistence.” (p 271)
The absolute size of the productive supply might increase, but only, as Marx says, in Capital II, because capitalist production, on the basis of the division of labour, itself significantly increases total output. At the same time, as a result of this increase in productivity, of the concentration and the increased rate of turnover, the size of the productive supply declines in relative terms. This is the same process by which, as a result of rising productivity, and a rise in the rate of turnover, less capital is advanced relative to output, causing thereby a rise in the annual rate of profit.
“On the other hand: if we consider the historical foundation on which this process develops, from which manufacture arises, the industrial mode of production whose characteristic feature is the division of labour, then this concentration can only take place in the form that these workers are assembled together as wage-workers, that is, as workers who must sell their labour-power because their conditions of labour confront them as alien property, as an independent, alien force. This implies that these conditions of labour confront them as capital; in other words, these means of subsistence and means of labour (or, what amounts to the same thing, the disposal of them through the intermediary of money) are in the hands of individual owners of money or of commodities, who, as a result, become capitalists. The loss of the conditions of labour by the workers is expressed in the fact that these conditions become independent as capital or as things at the disposal of the capitalists.” (p 271)
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