The independent labourer accumulates means of production from their surplus labour/product. But, as a wage labourer, this surplus labour/product is directly appropriated by the capitalist, and the capitalist appropriates the surplus labour/product of an increasing number of wage labourers. Whatever may have been the means by which such capitalists accumulated their original capital, it is necessarily the case, therefore, that an ever increasing proportion of the actual capital in existence is merely the appropriated surplus labour/product of those wage workers. The capitalist does not accumulate capital as a result of their own saving, or abstinence, but as a result of the forced saving and abstinence they impose upon the workers, so as to maximise the surplus product.
“Since Jones himself describes a state of affairs in which things have not yet reached this stage and where unity prevails, he certainly should have described this “separation” as the real generation process of capital. Once this separation exists, this process does indeed take place and it continues and extends, since the surplus labour of the worker always confronts him as the revenue of others, through the saving of which alone wealth can be accumulated and the scale of production extended.” (p 422)
What is actually revenue, created by labour, thereby appears as revenue attributable to capital, in the form of profit. This profit when accumulated as capital, thereby reproduces this relationship, and creates the appearance that the employment of labour is dependent upon the creation of profit, and its accumulation as capital.
“The original unity between the worker and the conditions of production [abstracting from slavery, where the labourer himself belongs to the objective conditions of production] has two main forms: the Asiatic communal system (primitive communism) and small-scale agriculture based on the family (and linked with domestic industry) in one form or another. Both are embryonic forms and both are equally unfitted to develop labour as social labour and the productive power of social labour. Hence the necessity for the separation, for the rupture, for the antithesis of labour and property (by which property in the conditions of production is to be understood).” (p 422-3)
As Marx set out earlier, in opposition to the moralistic, Sismondian conceptions, it is precisely in this that rests the progressive historical mission of capital.
“The most extreme form of this rupture, and the one in which the productive forces of social labour are also most powerfully developed, is capital. The original unity can be reestablished only on the material foundation which capital creates and by means of the revolutions which, in the process of this creation, the working class and the whole society undergo.” (p 423)
The relationship between capital and wage labour is not the only relation. There is also a relation between revenue and labour. A wage labourer may pay, out of their wages, another worker to clean their house, for example. A landlord, out of their rent, may pay a worker to clean their house, or provide other labour services. Marx says that Jones does not sufficiently emphasise these other potential relations.
“This always presupposes the first relationship.” (p 423)
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