By replacing individual private labour with collective, cooperative labour, and private production with social production, in combination with the growing domination of society over Nature, capitalism creates the necessary conditions for Socialism.
“In both these ways, capitalist production eliminates private property and private labour, even though as yet in antagonistic forms.” (p 426)
Adam Smith had shown that productive labour is that which exchanges with capital, whereas unproductive labour exchanges with revenue. Productive labour produces surplus value, which is the basis for capital accumulation. Unproductive labour produces new value, but not surplus value. Jones shows that unproductive labour, where it predominates, is characteristic of precapitalist modes of production.
““… capital is the instrument through which all the causes which augment the efficiency of human labour, and the productive powers of nations, are brought into play… Capital is the stored-up results of past labour used to produce some effect in some part of the task of producing wealth” (p. 35).” (p 426)
Marx quotes from Jones' a passage where Jones sets out the development of this cooperative nature of labour, as promoted by capitalism, and how capitalist production draws in ever wider spheres to this cooperation. And, he quotes a further passage from Jones, setting out the considerable scope still existing in the world economy for extending these benefits.
““It will be convenient, and it is reasonable, to consider the act of production as incomplete till the commodity produced has been placed in the hands of the person who is to consume it; all done previously has that point in view. The grocer’s horse and cart which brings up our tea from Hertford to the College, is as essential to our possession of it for the purposes of consumption, as the labour of the Chinese who picked and dried the leaves.”)
“But … this capital … does not perform in every community all the tasks it is capable of performing. It takes them up gradually and successively in all cases; and it is a remarkable and an all-important fact, that the one special function, the performance of which is essential to the serious advance of the power of capital in all its other functions, is exactly that which, in the case of the greater portion of the labourers of mankind, capital has never yet fulfilled at all” (pp. 35-36).
“I allude to the advance of the wages of labour” (p. 36).
“The wages of labour are advanced by capitalists in the case of less than one-fourth of the labourers of the earth [….] this fact … of vital importance in accounting for the comparative progress of nations” (loc. cit.)
“Capital, or accumulated stock, after performing various other functions in the production of wealth, only takes up late that of advancing to the labourer his wages” (p. 79).” (p 426-7)
Marx notes that, in the last sentence, on page 79, Jones does indeed refer to capital as a relation and not as a stock. This relation, embodied within the productive-capital, is its basic form, which develops the productive power of social labour, and, in the process, “revolutionises all social and political relationships”. It only fully achieves this revolutionary historic role “when it steps forth as industrial capital.”
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