At the end of the year, the worker has consumed their wages, to live, and must sell their labour-power, once again. Capital, by this process, has not only had the value of its stock of constant capital preserved and transferred into production, but has had that stock, thereby, physically replaced. It has also had its stock of wage goods (variable-capital) physically replaced, which is now ready to employ labour, once again, in the coming year. In addition, it has had its own personal consumption needs met, by the workers' surplus labour, and with enough left over for it to also buy additional factories, machines, materials, and to employ additional workers, so as to produce even more profit in the next year.
“Thus Capital presupposes wage-labour; wage-labour presupposes capital. They reciprocally condition the existence of each other; they reciprocally bring forth each other.
Does a worker in a cotton factory produce merely cotton textiles? No. He produces capital. He produces values which serve afresh to command his labour and by means of it now to create values.
Capital can only increase by exchanging itself for labour-power, by calling wage-labour to life. The labour-power of the wage-worker can only be exchanged for capital by increasing capital, by strengthening the power whose slave it is. Hence, increase of capital is increase of the proletariat, that is of the working class.” (p 31).
This forms the objective basis of the ideas of social-democracy. For Sismondi, he could only see this exploitation of the working-class, and so opposed the development of capital. He did not see that this very process, by also developing the forces of production, and creating an expanding working-class, also creates the conditions for ending that exploitation, by transcending the limits imposed by capitalism. It was reactionary moralising, and the same continues, today. For example, its manifest in moralising attitudes that try to impose the standards of developed economies on to developing economies, whether in relation to employment of children, welfare, or environmental standards.
Yet, the developed economies did not, and could not abide by such standards when they were industrialising, and can do so, now, only because of a long period of accumulating the proceeds of past labour, into vast amounts of labour-saving fixed capital that has raised social productivity, and rate of surplus value above that in developing economies. Imperialism, itself, utilises such moralising to its benefit, because, of course, small, domestic producers cannot meet these developed world standards, which leaves open vast reserves of labour-power to be employed by multinational capital, in those countries, in large, modern factories, with high levels of productivity, which can meet those standards.
“The interests of the capitalist and those of the worker are, therefore, one and the same, assert the bourgeois and their economists. Indeed! The worker perishes if capital does not employ him. Capital perishes if it does not exploit labour-power and, in order to exploit it, it must buy it. The faster capital intended for production, productive capital, increases, the more, therefore, industry prospers, the more the bourgeoisie enriches itself and the better business is, the more workers does the capitalist need, the more dearly does the worker sell himself.
The indispensable condition for a tolerable situation of the worker is, therefore, the fastest possible growth of productive-capital.” (p 30-31)
And, that is true so long as capitalism persists, but, so long as it persists, although it creates these most favourable conditions, and rising living standards, as described by The Civilising Mission of Capital, the fundamental contradiction, inherent within it, means that it is subject to repeated cyclical crises. The solution to that resides in going beyond capitalism to socialism, but the road to that socialism resides not in a reactionary attempt to hold back or resist capitalist development as the petty-bourgeois moralists and “anti-capitalists” seek to do, but to embrace its progressive elements, and to push them forwards.
As Marx put it in his Speech On Free Trade,
“But, in general, the protective system of our day is conservative, while the free trade system is destructive. It breaks up old nationalities and pushes the antagonism of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to the extreme point. In a word, the free trade system hastens the social revolution. It is in this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, that I vote in favour of free trade.”
So long as capitalism exists, these contradictions persist. The best conditions for workers, within it, are those in which capital expands freely and rapidly, but those conditions imply, also, the continued and more extensive exploitation of labour, and to inevitable crises and periods of unemployment, stagnation and misery, as well as towards now threatening humanity with nuclear extinction.
“To say that the interests of capital and those of the workers are one and the same, is only to say that capital and wage-labour are two sides of one and the same relation. The one conditions the other just as usurer and squanderer condition each other.
As long as the wage-worker is a wage-worker, his lot depends upon capital. That is the much-vaunted community of interests between worker and capitalist.” (p 32)
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