This Perpetuation of the Worker: An Interpretation of Part 7 of Marx’s Capital Vol. I

“All that we got it seems we have lost; we must have really paid the cost” – The Wailers, “Burnin’ and Lootin’”

We must always come to face the questions that are generated by our critique. So very often we are asked, “How will this Commune come to be? Who is it that will bring it about?” A different world may sound nice, but “human nature,” that conveniently pesky notion, always seems to get in the way. A poisonous cynicism such as this is just a mask worn to conceal the experiences of a life of collective impotence in the face of the relentless onslaught of capitalist temporality–we flatten the courses and trajectories of historical development as our own lifetimes are flattened into an abstract social substance destined to become the disposable property of others. Even those who proclaim their own faith in the struggle against that destiny can fall into the trap of equivocation by restricting their horizons, or even refusing to define them. A traumatic history unnerves them. Disavowal and denial appear to be paths open to those fearful of a history that challenges us to take responsibility for it. In such a paralysis, the crude reanimations of the commodity world’s fetishism conceal from us the potential resurrection that lies within.

There are times when the faithful in crisis may look upon a devotion to this past with incredulity. We ask ourselves, “How are the dead to be raised? With what body will they come?” We too can become beleaguered by the appearance of the eternity of our conditions. Reification of capitalist social relations occurs in many registers. The standard of life in our degraded condition can be mistaken for the substance of resurrection. Products of our own hands can be confused as the creations of capital, and viewed as bereft of emancipatory potential. What such divergent reactions have in common is their situation in separation from the course of transformation that appears to us as History, a course that is always open to us to make our own.

What is sown does not come to life unless it can pass, for the seed that is planted is the body that passes from its first form into the body that will be. This course is determined by the unity of moments we gather within us that are posited in that action, that which is carried out with the intention of seeing that seed cast off the body of its initial appearance. Aversion to such passing attempts to make a fear of what will be lost, and beneath this fear lurks the recognition of all that has already been lost in the course of a life committed to a peaceful survival.

The value of the individual life teaches us this fear by preserving us as objects intended for consumption, in a life lived in isolation from and competition with others. Yet it is this very unity-in-struggle of our conditions that defies the validity of this credo, and makes what is true of it a moment of our collective liberation. In our common brokenness, we are endless as the sea, every wave’s particular emergence a realization of the body’s strength as a whole, a moment only possible as the whole body. Each breath of ours contains life and death, as we live to continue what can only be brought to bear by our many forms of passing, the demises and downfalls we claim as our own and give to the future.

The production of surplus value is lived within as the ongoing temporal fractures that the life of the worker undergoes in the mediation of their subsistence through the wage-form. Living by selling moments of themselves, this ongoing conversion of lifetime into labor-time is the objectivity of the social production process endured as the worker’s interiority, their praxis the externalization of this struggle for time. What is lived in the individual life is now faced as social condition, yet it begins to perceive it as such in the antagonistic guise that they bear within them. The Collective Worker is a body composed of the relations between the Totally-Developed Individuals who are contained within this development by the wage-form, their capacities only formed for the valorization of capital. These capacities are alienated as the sale and purchase of labor-power makes the worker’s intellect and skill the appendage of a process that continually aims to suppress its need for their effort, though it can never rid itself of the need to exploit their labor-power. This conflict lived between the body of the Collective Worker as the struggle for the total development for social individuals is a form of the appearance of this existence within separation, a reflection of the very presuppositions from which the movements of capitalist production begin.

Value begins to function as capital when a sum of money is used to purchase means of production and labor-power. This movement in the sphere of circulation wears the mask of universality in the equivalences made by value’s monetary form of appearance, but it enacts a condition of separation in what the purchase differentiates. The movement only finds completion in the production process that unites these elements in their separation and produces them again as commodities with the potential to realize a greater sum of value in their subsequent purchase than they initially cost. The reproduction of this mutual alienation of the producer from their product, from themselves as product, is a condition of this society’s existence. The converted lifetimes of the Collective Worker form the social substance of that surplus value that is appropriated in so many fragments, different forms of existence that condition the production of various categories of person. Mutually independent forms such as profit, interest, rent, etc. are but modified forms of surplus value, a whole we experience broken up into parts, obscured to us by the mediating movements of circulation. The unity of that which is broken, however, will lift from us that veil that obscures the fundamental form of the process in its very continuation.

Whatever the social form of the production process, if it is to sustain the lives of a society, it must be continuous. Every social process of production is thus at the same time a process of reproduction, and the conditions of production at the same time conditions of reproduction. These conditions bear the form of that society, distinct from these abstract processes themselves that we know are a fixture throughout any historical development. Thus, if production has a capitalist form, so too will reproduction. The self-valorization of value becomes the condition of social life’s material continuity, as the labor process is itself subsumed to the dynamics of capital’s valorization. And so we begin to understand the personalization of these categories of social existence in the practical nature of a life’s reproduction. The economic character of capitalist becomes fixed to the person whose money constantly functions as capital. As surplus value arises from the movement of capital-in-process, it takes on the form of a revenue, a fund to satisfy the consumption of the capitalist. Consumed as periodically as it is gained, the initial stage of simple reproduction takes place.

Though simple reproduction may appear to be a simple instantiation of those very conditions that allowed the process to begin with, the mere repetition of this process moves towards a transformation by way of its own inexorable dialectic. The continuity of need within any material reproduction of social life will impose upon the process new characteristics brought about by the disappearance of other characteristics in the satisfaction of need, a necessity that conditions those very new characteristics. In the capitalist form of reproduction, this movement becomes intelligible to us in the form of alienated labor as the totalizing movement of historical temporality, a movement that becomes concrete to us at the social scale of classes in motion. We first apprehend this basis of sociality in the sale and purchase of labor-power as the act that appears to initiate reproduction. That the worker is paid not before, but after, the expenditure of their labor-power betrays the whole character of the process. They not only produce surplus value, but also variable capital, the historical form of the labor fund out of which they themselves are paid. What flows back to the worker in the form of wages is a portion of the product that they are themselves continually reproducing. This money form in which it is received conceals the fact that the worker is being paid in the transmuted form of the product of their past labor, yet when we realize this in the context of the scale and longevity of the successive iterations of the production process, it becomes clear that the capitalists pay us in the pat labor of previous generations.

As this calls forth the question of genesis, sending us searching time for an initiating moment, capital’s form of reproduction obscures this from our sight. Time appears to be buried under an insurmountable accumulation, an expanding mass. This process of accumulation is the name given by Marx to capitalist production’s form of reproduction, and it is within this situation of its temporal movement that we begin to see beyond the illusion of capital’s mass. For in the course of surplus value’s production, the periods of reproduction of that process will, in time, lead the surplus value produced and appropriated to replace the sum of the original value advanced. While the capitalist thinks that they are preserving their original capital while also appropriating the unpaid labor of others, their beliefs do not matter. In time, not a single atom of the value of their old capital continues to exist.

In the movement of capitalist reproduction, value is always eroding its conditions and replacing itself within new forms of appearance, an ever-changing same. The claim of capitalist modernity to a direction of historical progress is torn asunder on its own terms, as all such obfuscation does is to conceal the violent arrest of transformation within temporal continuity into a qualitative stasis. All “progress” that is claimed is but the refinement of methods for the cultivation and appropriation of lifetime as labor-time. Thus the mere continuity of the production process is the capitalization of surplus value, and the unpaid labor of others is materialized in the reciprocal alienation of capitalist social relations. That starting-point of the process, the division between the product of labor and labor itself, the objective conditions of labor and the subjectivity of labor-power, becomes the characteristic result of capitalist production by means of the continuity of simple reproduction. This process always converts material wealth into capital while the worker leaves the process as they entered it–a personal source of wealth that cannot make that wealth a reality for themselves. Their labor is alienated before they enter the process, and on that condition they constantly objectify themselves as an alien product. This constant conversions of labor-power consumed into capital creates the means of subsistence into purchasers of human beings and the means of production into their employers. The form of activity produces the world of objective wealth as capital, an alien power of domination and exploitation. And just as the Collective Worker produces this capital, the capitalist’s characteristic production is this subjective source of wealth, labor-power, in the physical body of the worker separated from their own means of objectification and realization. This perpetuation of the worker is the absolutely necessary condition for capitalist production.

Yet every process of reproduction, no matter how incessant, implies and carries within it the passing into demise of that which is regenerated through it. This worker is an active creation, a form that has to be maintained against the current of its vanishing necessity within the dialectic. The form of capitalist reproduction seeks to shape the practical needs of labor-power’s bodily regeneration into advancements of capital’s exigencies. Political Economy gives voice to this bodily possession in its concepts that distinguish the utility of the worker’s consumption, whether it be productive or unproductive. The worker’s consumption is, in truth, of two kinds. Their productive consumption is the work of their labor in the conversion of means of production into capital, a consumption of their labor-power by the capitalist. Productivity is determined within the form of its social activity. Unproductive consumption is the worker’s individual consumption, their use of the money they are paid for their labor-power to buy the means of subsistence. While distinct in operation, for the former allows the capitalist to continue to live and the latter the worker, both the capitalist and political economist declare that any consumption by the worker beyond the mere perpetuation of the working class to be unproductive. Capital declares on its face what it intends for us, albeit in concealed forms. And so the social scale of capitalist reproduction shapes the worker’s individual consumption into the reconversion of the means of subsistence into means of creating pools of fresh labor-power. Amidst the struggle over the means of subsistence, all the capitalist cares for is to reduce the worker’s individual consumption to the minimum of their necessity.

In capitalist relations of production, “productivity” is but the capitalist and the State’s production of a force that produces wealth for other people. The worker comes to relate to themselves and their own individual consumption with shame and futility in various guises, witnessing themselves become but needy individuals in their dependency upon capital, only able to satisfy their own needs by projecting the indefinite deferral of need’s complete satisfaction into the future. This is how the capital-relation comes to shape materiality, in the organization of the continuous movements of social metabolic activity, the invisible threads of social labor’s interdependency. Yet this is a historical product, the reproduction of the working class implying the transmission and accumulation of skills between generations, even if in the alienated form of the capitalist application of machinery.

In this fact the relation bears its undoing within its necessary conditions. The living machinery of capital is always capable of severing the ties of its threads and reforging the conditions by which they are bound by social necessity, though force lies just beyond the boundaries they are contained within. Their economic bondage appears guaranteed by the legal fiction of the contract, the semblance of freedom that appears to be granted by the independence from ownership that the sale and purchase of labor-power affords, but this independence conceals the total movement in time, which is merely the successive changes of owners. Though particular work conditions may change, the form does not, and labor’s universal alienation goes on in this axis of polarity between wage-laborer and capitalist. The moment of the State preserves this antagonistic struggle between classes ensuring the perpetuation of the law of this movement, institutionalizing praxis’ objectifications as a petrification against the transformative current of reproduction’s transience. The movement of these relations in their temporal continuity take on the appearance of an inertia that we call the weight of History. Though mistaken often for a mass, the recognition of its movement reveals it to be not a fixed object, but the moving balance of forces in the class struggle.

The antagonistic constitution of temporality by class struggle is a product of the modes of social practice that objectify this relation in the labor process. Reproduction proceeds to its capitalist form, the accumulation of capital, in the movements that reconvert the surplus value produced by the production process into capital. The capital-value that began the process returns to its original form, but in a position to allow for a larger scale of production, thus the surplus value and its form as the surplus product must contain already its share of the material components of a new quantity of capital in its relation to the total social operation of capitalist production and accumulation. The antagonism continually bursts through its successive forms of mediation, altering the form of simple reproduction into a spiral, boring its way into the Earth as it does into and between the lives of human species-being.

Marx begins his immanent critique of these mediating forms with the demonstration of the dialectical movement of the laws of the commodity as property into the laws of capitalist appropriation. What is essential to grasp in this movement is how the law of the exchange of equivalents becomes its opposite through its own internal movement, a recapitulation of this contradiction in a higher register. What matters most to capital in every instance is that the working class creates by the surplus labor of one year the capital that will employ the additional labor of the next year, that the ownership of past unpaid labor is the sole condition for the appropriation of living unpaid labor on a constantly increasing scale. The surplus value that makes up this additional capital is the result of the purchase of labor-power with part of the original capital, presupposing legally nothing more than the worker’s power to dispose of themselves freely, and the money-owner’s power to freely dispose of that which now belongs to them.

These presuppositions within the exchange of equivalent values reveals an appropriation without equivalent in the differentiation of life conditions between worker and capitalist that are reproduced as the condition of this movement. The alienated form of labor is manifest as a struggle between the form of labor-power’s sale and purchase as a relation of equality, and its content as this appropriation without equivalent by the capitalist. The very violation of the commodity’s form of freedom arises from the adherence to its laws that articulate the conditions of its formal possibility. We in turn see how labor forges its own chains, as it is made to reproduce itself through its own struggle to appropriate the share of the efforts of past generations of unpaid labor, in the wage-form’s mediation of subsistence as moments of crystallized surplus labor, the class’ alienated social interdependence. Capital permits freedom only through conscription into the working class’ self-mutilation of its own lifetime. Thus, the accumulation of wealth cannot be a universal freedom in capital’s mediating forms.

At the level of the mode of appropriation, Political Economy seeks to account for the increasing scale of reproduction, making the accumulation of capital the first duty of every citizen. The dismal science endeavors to bind the working class to capital’s conditions of freedom. The terms of consumption are thought to be what determines the scale of accumulation, as if the capitalist holds in their hands the fate of their laborers, is the sole bearer of their interests. The surplus value produced and appropriated by the capitalist is both a fund for satisfying the capitalist’s own requirements for individual consumption, as well as a fund for accumulation. As the former, it exists in the form of revenue, and as the latter, capital. The ratio of these parts determines the magnitude of accumulation, and this is a division made as an act of the capitalist’s will. In this moment of their own deliberation a morality forms out of the relations of production themselves.

The capitalist has no historical value or right to historical existence except as capital personified. What initially appears to them as an act of their own will in determining the shares of what is appropriated conceals a decision to continue reproducing themselves as a capitalist. Whether they use revenue to pursue pleasure in this life or employ capital towards accumulation, they hasten the movement of their own transitory existence. Their own individual consumption fulfils what is expected to be enjoyed of a life of time liberated by the despotic exploitation of others’ time, but it does not accumulate and add to their ongoing enrichment. As capital personified, they fanatically pursue the valorization of value, production for production’s sake. In doing so and expanding the scale of their capital and its operation, they continue to spur on the development of society’s productive forces, creating the material conditions of production which alone can form the real basis of a higher form of society in which the full and free development of every individual forms the ruling principle. Yet, in order to remain a capitalist, they must always act against the current of this creation immanent to their own reproduction. The capitalist is subordinate to the preservation of themselves as a cog within this social mechanism.

This is the freedom to which they aim to subordinate the working class, whom the capitalist comes to believe deprives them of their own pleasure. In accumulation’s passion to conquer the world of social wealth, the working class bears the brunt of this violent tension that the capitalist class lives within between the drive to accumulate and the desire for enjoyment. It is in the throes of this awareness of the antagonistic constitution of temporal conditions for life that the capitalist asserts the most fantastic doctrinal ideas about the source of their own wealth. In its earliest days, Political Economy would not bat an eye at admitting that the appropriation of unpaid labor is the secret of making a profit, even as they fetishistically view surplus labor solely in absolute terms. But with the revolt of the workers, new accounts of the capitalist’s virtues begin to emerge to mask the class struggle behind a notion of a common destiny. The capitalist learns to preach abstinence to the workers as a salve for their degradation, to promote this supposed asceticism of accumulation as to be a process to benefit the class it is intended to exploit and consume.

Even at its most confused, its most vulgar and reactive, Political Economy admits in such mystified forms, the techniques of this materialization of surplus value’s temporality in the practical movements of relations of production. The assumption that it is the proportion in which surplus value breaks up into capital and revenue means that ultimately the magnitude of capital’s accumulation depends on the absolute magnitude of surplus value. The incoherent theories restricting accumulation to a practice of appropriation have returned us to the sphere of production, the materiality of its living movements in the Collective Worker’s body. The extent of accumulation is not merely a matter of the division of revenue and capital, but the circumstances of labor-power’s degree of exploitation and its productivity in the process of social production. And these in turn bring us to observe the growing difference in the quantities between capital employed and capital consumed, affecting the magnitude of capital continually advanced to the production process.

Political Economy consistently confuses the degree of labor-power’s exploitation with the productivity of social labor because of the relations of production from which this science emerges: the constant war against the worker’s needs while always bearing itself the need for the worker to exist. Capital always aims to suppress the costs of labor-power towards an absolute zero, a limit point always beyond reach, yet which guides the formation of the working class and the conditions for the production of its means of subsistence. In this way does capital condition the fund it must create for labor’s reproduction into a channel for capital accumulation. Capital’s elasticity as a social relation comes into focus, as the division between labor-power and its means of production as variable and constant capital begins to expand valorization’s field of maneuver. The boundless thirst for additional surplus labor can be quenched by greater exertions of labor-power already employed without proportional augmentations of the constant portion of capital. This apparent freedom of capital’s movement, which is really just the subsumed freedom of labor’s creative self-activity, presents itself as an eternal condition through the movement of the two original agencies forming any product, Man and Nature.

The direct action of human species-being upon its inorganic conditions of existence becomes an immediate source of greater accumulation, without the intervention of any new capital. The social organization of these elements in the material reproduction of life as capital forms a restriction on the development of the bearer of labor-power by ensuring their need to maintain their existence solely as such. In doing so, capital expands beyond the limits to its accumulation that appear fixed by magnitudes of value, revealing a process of relational transmission between the origination of wealth in labor’s action upon its inherited conditions, and the action of these conditions upon labor. The techniques learned in the capitalist form of this metabolic relation come to fuse the increase of productivity with the cheapening of the worker, and the struggle of labor’s emancipation now also entails the distinction to be made by labor between the achievements of its social productive powers and capital’s subsumption of them. Science and technology give capital a power of expansion independent of the given magnitude of capital actually functioning, being as they are aspects of the practical development of labor’s relations of production, perpetuating itself as an always-increasing capital value in an ever-renewed form. Labor’s evaluative capacity to transmit its relations in this process of its self-objectification preserves value in these successive iterations, and this natural power of living labor, posited to the separation of labor from its means of production, comes to appear as that of capital. As all the powers of labor project themselves in this form as powers of capital, just as all the value-forms of the commodity do as forms of money, these transmuted forms of the collective practical knowledge of past labor initially appear to the Proletarian in fetishized form, as if they are exclusively means of capital’s exploitation and domination, rather than their own capacities appropriated as gifts to capital.

Not only is value thus not materiality, but so too is it not the exclusive form of socially organizing the conditions of living labor-power. As values, the bearers of labor-power confront themselves and their conditions as the inertia of generations of accumulated unpaid, alienated labor. The wage-form’s mediation of subsistence reproduces the worker’s life into an interiority of compartmentalized fragments of time, expropriated by the violation of the worker’s needs by this form’s perpetuation. It is this internally fractured time that is externalized as the creation of value by this form of alienated labor. The evaluative capacity of living labor’s preservation and transformation of the elements of its process appears as values when the relation of capital’s constitutive separation is reproduced, the material shape reflecting itself back to us in our consciousness. This projection of the powers of labor as those of capital is that struggle we live to distinguish our means of production from the antagonistic social mask they wear, a mask placed upon them by our hands.

How is it that we begin to recognize the presence of this mask when we are so immersed within and dependent upon a world in which our survival is shaped as capital? The non-identity of value and materiality leads us also to the recognition of the material world’s sociality, and thus value’s non-identity with social practice as such. This is what the differentiations prompted by the evaluations within historical time bring to bear upon us, transforming our relation to the toil of our condition within capital’s subsumption of the labor process. Capital’s need for the worker is in a constant state of tension with the way that the reproduction of capitalist relations accumulates the conditions in which this necessity of the worker as the form of social labor vanishes. This is expressed even in value terms by the efforts to restrict the growth of variable capital, an action not restricted to acting upon any fixed magnitude of living labor-power to be employed. The magnitude of labor-power to be exploited can move independently of any movement in its expression as variable capital. Reaching continually beyond its apparent limits, capital at the same time appears to fix these limits in the very constraint and reduction upon the life conditions of the Proletariat in the course of surplus labor’s degradations.

Surplus value’s reconversion into capital is then apparent in these practical dimensions as the praxis of living labor directing its reproduction within that temporality of valorization, positing the development of conditions and relations that require its continuity. The spiral shape of accumulation’s metamorphoses still confound us in their apparent circularity. Discerning the specific moments of the accumulation of capital as a total process, its characteristic movements and results, we must descend deeper underneath these conceptual movements into the concrete dynamics that abstraction develops as a means to comprehend and make them into a possible field of action. This descent brings us to a series of tendential movements that we will recognize as the history of capital’s maneuvers of preservation amidst successive transformations of its conditions and encounters with its limits. We come now to those balances of forces in the class struggle that maintain the social relations of the freedom of labor-power’s exploitation against the production of the necessity of realizing social reproduction as a self-conscious praxis of free development within liberated time.

This is intelligible to us at the social scale of class struggle in the total social capital of material life, a level of abstraction that occasions Marx’s concept of the composition of capital. It is here that we develop a language for the complex movement of unity-in-separation that is the industrial battlefield of the class struggle within the shell of competing branches of production and the imperial ambitions of warring nations. The influence of the growth of capital on the fate of the working class requires of us a language to name the distinct moments in its social metabolic process of reproduction, that dialectical reciprocity of its sociality and materiality that is the self-movement of alienated labor. As such, the composition of capital appears to us in a twofold sense. As value, it is determined by the proportion in which it is divided into constant capital and variable capital, the respective sums of value spent on purchasing means of production and labor-power. As material, these elements are taken up in accordance with their function in the production process, determined by the mass of the means of production employed and the mass of labor necessary for their employment. The former, Marx names the value composition of capital, and the latter the technical composition of capital. These two dimensions to the process of capital’s composition are distinct, but appear as a unity in their operation, a state in which the value composition is determined by the technical composition and mirrors its changes that is named the organic composition of capital. The social metabolism of capital’s total organism is a movement of the world in the self-alienating form of values, taking the very shape of this social hieroglyphic.

As Marx takes us through the movements of the process of capital’s accumulation on the social scale of self-alienating labor’s praxis as a totalizing development, the inertia that is felt upon the working class as the weight of a History dominated by the triumphs of capital is revealed to be the collective movement of their practices within the production of their total social life. What the working class will come to learn is that it may be free of this crushing weight’s pressure bearing down upon them, but only in the struggle that ends the working class as a form of existence. The downfall of its state will be the Proletariat’s victory. This first becomes apparent in the composition of capital that is most favorable to the working class, in which the value and technical proportions remain unaltered in the course of accumulation. A growing demand for labor-power emerges from capital’s organic body.

There are many reasons why this may emerge, many such movements in which the growth of capital does not immediately alter its organic composition. What is key is that this growth implies the growth of its variable constituent, and that the scale of accumulation extends such that the requirements of this accumulating capital may exceed the growth in labor-power or number of workers. A rise in wages appears on offer as the working class embodies the need of the capitalist to affirm their continuity in securing accumulation’s complete movement. The subsumption of capital gives the problem the appearance of one of supply and demand, a relative scarcity of labor occasioning the appreciation of its value. Though these circumstances are more favorable to the workers, the advantage taken within them does not yet alter the fundamental character of capitalist production, The leverage gained from any interplay of supply and demand is the fetishized containment of struggle as that between commodity owners. The reproduction of labor-power within these terms is still re-incorporated into capital as its means of valorization, and the creation of more labor-power still looms as a double-edged sword to both labor and capital.

Accumulation of capital is therefore identical to the multiplication of the Proletariat. In this confrontation of its own need, the forces of capital work to expand the pool of potential surplus labor at its disposal, and the mass of the laboring poor increases, collectively inheriting a condition of dependence upon capitalist production for survival. The generational transmission of this experience as time accumulated in its dispossessed form conditions the Proletariat to perceive the capital-relation in its personification as an eternal relation. Yet this very personification which naturalizes a social relation gives it a form as transient as its very historical character. The collective projection of the future in a common praxis is all that this eternity rests upon, and its continuity is as fragile as the leverage of the situation of workers being in demand is. The capital-relation’s apparent character as a natural metabolic necessity begins to pass away to the exploited element in qualitative transformations in the historical temporality that comes into focus through unpaid labor’s reproduction in materiality as perpetual loss. In the struggle to gain within the form of wages, a rise in variable capital may decrease the proportion of unpaid labor in a production process, but so long as the capital-relation persists, it will never go so far as to diminish to the point of threatening capital’s survival. So long as the wage-form continues, immiseration lies just around the corner once capital regains its footing after granting a concession. The mask of eternity is placed upon its face by the serialization of alienated labor’s temporality of commodity-being, spatializing itself as a material continuity of a class adopting its dependency for survival as the horizon of its destiny.

Social reproduction in the form of capital’s accumulation locks the needs of living labor into a dependency that constantly defers and denies their complete satisfaction. Need is contained within the stasis of subsistence, modified within variations of comfort, the augmented survival that affords segments of the working class privileged treatment and conditions, but a life subsumed to the function of being a worker, an appendage of capital. As living moments of this social mechanism, the movements of the working class afford capital the means of overcoming the very limits it erected within its own path. The worker’s preservation of itself as worker arises as one manifestation of capitalist reaction to the more fully realized embodiment of its own need of labor. The antagonistic foundation of the capitalist’s temporality spatializes into a social movement in the consolidation of the forces of capital to produce a relative diminution of variable capital in the course of the accumulation process. At this point, the development of the productivity of social labor becomes the most powerful lever of accumulation.

The movements of surplus value’s production in absolute and relative terms are apparent here, objectified not only within the formation of conditions of the production process, but the totality of the life conditions of living labor. The growing extent of the means of production is an expression that always attends the growing productivity of labor in time. This increase in productivity appears to us in this form as a diminution of the mass of labor in proportion to this growth in its means of production, a growth of the objective factor of the labor process and a diminution of the subjective factor. In capital’s organic movement of composition, this change in the technical composition is reflected in its value composition as an increase of the constant element of capital at the expense of its variable constituent. These expressions of the material movement of social life as values provide only as approximation, for the values of these elements in relation to their mass can change. Increasing productivity of labor means that the mass of means of production consumed by labor-power increases, but their value in comparison with that mass diminishes. So too can values rise absolutely, but not in proportion to increases in mass. Value relations appear to conceal shifting relations in the respective masses of labor-power and means of production, coming to express strictly an ordering of social production to the efficiency of surplus labor-time’s production and exploitation. The transience of capital’s own continuity is obscured by the perpetuation of this accounting, the total movement of capital’s composition the interdependent functions of an organism.

There is something emerging out of the logic of this interminable cycle, one that is circular and incessantly self-positing, yet spiraling and expansive for its constant evasion of moments when it undermines itself, its social antagonism always threatening this continuity. In what appears inescapable of this towering accumulation of capital is the faint sense of an originating moment, an agent moment in historical time buried within the mechanical operation, just as the increasingly productive worker is hidden within the growing mass of machine operations they work and surveil. The form of social production relations reveals the history of its formation in the course of its own reproduction. For when the prevailing system is the production of commodities, where means of production and labor-power are related to as the property of private persons, cooperation on a large scale can only be realized through the growth of individual capitals, and this only appears as the transformation of the social means of production and subsistence into the private property of capitalists. A certain accumulation of capital in the hands of individual producers forms a necessary precondition for the capitalist mode of production.

This originary accumulation is only first apparent to us as a series of movements of capital’s social metabolic order on the total social scale, and we see it in the movement of each individual capital’s composition. Every individual capital is a concentration of means of production in the hands of a capitalist entity with a corresponding command over a quantity of workers. This formation of the social production process on the scale of a society’s operations emerges organically from their relations as mutually independent and competitive producers of commodities. The growth of any accumulating capital intensifies this concentration, while their movements of competition repel the individual capitals, checking the growth of any one concentration. This metabolic pulse of repulsion and attraction is the animation of a landscape of production scattered out across many points, a fragmentation that extends its reach and prolongs its life in the perpetuation of this brokenness. It is this unity of their repulsion that counteracts their individuation by attraction, as concentration moves from that of the constituent elements of an individual capital to that of capitals already formed. The expropriation of capitalist by capitalist destroys their individual independence as they embody in their own relations to each other the hostile interdependence that is the condition of their class-being.

This centralization of capitals sees the growth of capital to a huge mass in a single hand in one place, because it has been lost by many in another place. The mass of social wealth in its form as capital is the reverberation of a loss perpetuated in the interdependent relations of social reproduction. That common wound of the Collective Working Body throbs within every social individual’s being as their development is confined to the basic reproduction of their disposability in the labor market. Capital’s movements of concentration and centralization are the solidification of a social metabolic order that cheapens and degrades the worker. The new forces that come into existence with this development of capitalist production demonstrate the immanent substance of this antagonistic order’s necessity of confrontation. Within capital’s own struggles amongst itself, the credit system emerges from the anarchy of its ubiquitous violence to condition a general foundation of class solidarity in the continuity of this constant war that it makes possible. This specific machine for capital’s centralization draws together disposable money in its scattered state across the surface of society to transform this separation into processes socially combined through their very separation. It gives birth to new branches of industry that could not exist without it, transforming old capitals into new forms, attracting fewer workers in proportion to their magnitudes, repelling more workers in the reproduction of their new compositions.

Capital’s antagonistic social metabolic order moves in the course of its reproduction as this composition of an immanent class solidarity in the material operations of the world of social production. This solidarity, however, is not a fixed, objective state at all moments, for it is composed of a negativity that is not idle amidst a terrain of shifting conditions. Classes come to know themselves in a broken state that is the living praxis of temporal fragmentation that forms their objective conditions as values. The social objectivity of a class-being within the reproduction of the capital-relation finds coherence around praxis within the recognition of lifetime’s production as disposable material. The bourgeoisie may be just as subordinate to the compulsions of this form as the Proletariat, yet their existence becomes defined by their praxis that preserves the continuity of this condition for others, to save itself from this fate that it deems a worthy one for others.

It is this recognition that allows us to perceive class differentiation in the relations of production beyond the direct production and labor processes, and contains the potential solidarity of the Proletariat beyond the struggle within the workplace that is divided by the labor market that conditions its continuity. And so Marx takes us beyond the fate of the working class in production to the general social misery that capitalist production demands, the surplus population that capital forms as the raw material of surplus value in a definite shape of human species-being. The progression of capital’s accumulation sees the variable constituent diminish relative to the growth of the total capital, while also producing the conditions that multiply the Proletariat as a source of surplus labor. Though variable capital grows in absolute terms with this course of development, it is in a constantly diminishing proportion, resulting in the appearance of an absolute increase of the working population, moving more rapidly than variable capital of the means of absorbing and employing it. The surplus population that forms then is one surplus only to the needs of capital and its average requirements for valorization.

There is then no natural, abstract law of population that we bear witness to in this phenomenon, but the law of population of the capitalist mode of production, one peculiar to its historical epoch. This surplus population is a condition that forms a necessary lever of capital’s accumulation in turn, as its potential disposability and exclusion from the wage makes it, in the desperation of its own deprivation from need’s satisfaction, an industrial reserve army, a mass that is dominated by the inertia of dead labor in its immiseration. The Proletariat perpetuates itself as the worker within this mass of redundancy and superfluity. This enclosure of temporality is endured as the fractural spatiality of class-being, the encounter with a material world whose operation is posited towards the necessity of one’s own disposability. Even before the individual proletarian experiences the personal moment of loss, it must come to know its conditions as the accumulated loss of past generations, their lives turned into the labor-time that built a home designed to repel them.

This mass as the industrial reserve army increases capital’s elasticity and powers of sudden expansion, making possible the violent throwing of great numbers of workers to decisive branches of industry without fatally damaging the scale of production in other branches. The market’s vicissitudes that follow the accumulation of capital compel the movements of this crowd that advances with the growing mass of social wealth. Modern industry’s peculiar cyclical pattern of historical time emerges here out of capitalist accumulation’s flinging of human beings across the Earth between branches of production and the degradation of slums–the Crisis, that constant oscillation between periods of average activity, production at high pressure, collapse, and stagnation. Though we deal in a world of perpetual and differentiated crises, their constancy in that very diversity of their appearances derives from the very conditions that depend on the constant formation, the relative absorption, and the ongoing reformation of the industrial reserve army. The arrival of the Crisis in the course of capitalist production’s repetition is the socialization of a reproduction carried out as the shattering of conditions for lifetime’s development for the sake of capital’s necessity, its boundless thirst for surplus labor.

The freedom of labor in the capitalist mode of production is one of a choice between abandonment or exploitation, and in the end it is but the semblance of a decision made by the worker to sell their own labor-power. In time, the cyclical repetitions of crises will ensure that every proletarian knows the experience of both fates. In the desperation of survival, the violent means of enforcing the differential valuations amongst this mass of human species-being take on the fetishized appearance of a natural force. This form of freedom becomes in practice the Collective Working Body’s self-mutilation, for capital’s flexibility and range of maneuver grows, as a larger variable capital can now set more labor in motion without enlisting more workers. The competitive pressure of universal disposability means also that a variable capital of the same magnitude can set in motion more labor with the same mass of labor-power. And yet, even labor’s obedience to capital will not be enough to ensure its livelihood, for in time it becomes cheaper for a greater number of less-skilled labor-powers to be set in motion by displacing costlier, and more potentially powerful, skilled labor-powers. Capital never forgets the nature of its war, though it comprehends it only in the limits of the capitalist’s class consciousness. And so, it learns to enlist the Proletariat in a war against itself, as the overwork of the employed part of the class swells the ranks of its reserves, and the pressure of competition by that reserve submits the employed to overwork, to a submission to the dictates of capital.

The surplus population in its function as the industrial reserve army is a necessity to the preservation of the form of the worker against the momentum of the worker as a vanishing necessity at this stage of labor’s historical development of its social productive powers. Marx shows us the negative relief of a new necessity demanding to be realized within this class’ self-movement in a broken solidarity of its formation. The law-like movement of the supply and demand of labor that appears to dictate the terms of wages occurs against the backdrop of this relative surplus population, the despotism of capital that acts on both sides at once, increasing the supply of workers by separating them from their capacity to determine their conditions of existence and the satisfaction of their needs at the same time as its demand for labor grows. This despotism shows its true face whenever the Proletariat’s organization of itself , the realization of the solidarity of its class-being, disturbs the action of this law, and force breaks through the fetishized veil of compulsory movements.

Marx’s identification of this relative surplus population’s different forms of existence is able to name a solidarity to what is experienced as individuated moments, lives flung between poles of the labor market. Whenever a worker is partially or wholly unemployed, they belong to the relative surplus population, and every employed worker’s security of employment is defined in relation to their not being in that state. One foot is always in the grave. In its floating form, workers are sometimes repelled, sometimes attracted again in greater masses, so that the number employed increases on the whole, but in a constantly decreasing proportion to the scale of production. There is a constant rhythm here of expendable workers, with a tempo gradually accelerating into the routine of rapid replacements of generations of workers. As this becomes a consistent feature, the appearance of a constant flow from a source of relative surplus population gives rise to the latent form, a point at which the distribution channels of labor-power’s movement become wide open. The constancy of this movement in the dynamics of capital accumulation give rise to a stagnant form, the portion of the active labor army with extremely irregular employment, characterized by a maximum of working time and a minimum of wages. It is at this point that, out of necessity from its condition of perpetual disposability, the surplus population begins to form a self-reproducing and self-perpetuating element of the working class. The lowest sediment of this relative surplus population dwells in the sphere of pauperism, from which the need that forms the lumpenproletariat arises.

These various forms are the direct manifestation of surplus value’s production and the reconversion of its temporality into capital. The conversion of lifetime into disposable surplus labor-time passes a sentence of premature death upon the generations that inherit the worked matter of past generations as capital. Industry’s success leaves in its wake a trail of victims, demoralized, ragged, rendered incapable by injury or age, mutilated in body and spirit. This pauperism is the hospital of the active labor-army, lives consigned to a fate of dead weight, its production a necessity of capitalist reproduction implied by the necessity of the surplus population. The negated reproduction of Proletarian life is a precondition of the continuity of the capitalist mode of production. It is this abandonment that defines the limits of the wage-form that the Proletariat learns to live in a relative autonomy to the wage. Even in such imperfect and exploitative forms that this can take, we still begin to learn a simple, but important truth–the fate of wage labor is not a natural destiny of our survival, but what capital needs of us to survive.

It is here where Capital reaches a climax in the general law of capitalist accumulation, the expression of capital’s total movement as the extent of its realization, the essence that must appear, the absolute limit of its promise for the condition of our species-being. The greater is the social wealth as functioning capital, the greater the absolute mass of the Proletariat. As the powers of capitalist industry expand, so too does the productivity of labor, and thus grows the share of the Proletariat rendered surplus, the industrial reserve army growing to consume the active labor army from which it sprung, and from this industrial reserve army grows the pauperized sections of the working class. We see now in the contradictions of capitalist production’s mediating forms of social relation the total social objectification of its constitutive antagonism of class struggle. It manifests as the mutual puzzle of the accumulation of wealth’s identity in the accumulation of misery. The working population will increase more rapidly than the valorization requirements for capital, and in proportion as capital accumulates, the situation of the worker holding their place within that movement grows worse. This general immiseration is the inevitable result of a species-being that preserves the need for the worker as a fixed condition of human life rather than a general capacity of all. As capital’s rendering of lifetime into various forms of disposability takes increasingly violent forms, a society of the ever-present threat of exterminating elements deemed surplus to projects of capital accumulation makes the need to abolish a life consigned to toil a necessity that the Proletariat will begin to feel within itself as a force of its own nature.

Within these very unseen chains of dependency to capital’s mediations of reproduction, the Proletariat develops forms of its autonomy by necessity, new moments in which it posits its own reproduction, and to which capital takes aim as new horizons of accumulation. The dependency upon capital is the continual initiation of that separation of labor and its conditions of existence, the exploitation of our interdependence in order to conceal its potential, for the continuity of lives that base their free development on the deprivation of others from the time to do the same. The inheritance of these conditions is an inertia of our social reproduction in motion, the spiraling form of accumulation, the materialization of these broken lifetimes as a geography of dispossession and conquest. The general law of capitalist accumulation coheres within and animates all particular laws established to preserve the continuity of this social metabolic order, these practices institutionalized in the State as a moment of this antagonistic struggle of classes rendered in a petrified form, the violent array of relating as values masking as a natural fate what is in reality an actively-reproduced relation. We are surrounded by opportunities to break free from these chains, but can only succeed if we recognize the ways in which we are bound to each other.

The composition of capital as an organic body is but a particular movement of a specific historical epoch, a motion ultimately in the hands of labor’s creative self-activity. That it is its own work that forges the world that exploits and dominates the Proletariat carries within the truth that the project of their liberation is in their hands as well. We are brought once more to face our earlier question, yet now in the face of this tide of such immense misery, preserving the false eternity of capital through the desperate perpetuation of needs as its own. How is the Proletariat to be realized as a collective body in that struggle if it lives its struggle in a broken solidarity, a suffering that forecloses its vision of the future beyond immediate satisfaction? The method of this inquiry’s unfolding has shown a path that we may navigate, an example of thought reflecting the revolutionary praxis that gives rise to its clarity. Marx derives the abstraction of the general law of capitalist accumulation from the real movements of the records of Proletarian life that he pores over at various moments. The unity of these diverse moments is what forms their character as any concrete moment in relation to a determinate process. The interdependent relation of these moments form into an abstraction, the capture of this unity in the concept, a weapon that can be made out of the chaotic and disparate violence of labor’s separation from its conditions of existence. It is in the movement of concretion of these diverse moments of distinct encounters, their unification in the process of capitalist production, and the affirmation of their necessity to capital in the course of reproduction’s path of accumulation, that the antagonism of the capital-relation’s separation is recognized as a common condition by those it endangers.

The solidarity of the Proletariat is a possibility realized by the need that is produced by and generated within the communality and communication of what it has lost. It is in this practice of recognition that it learns that it lives on the losses advanced by past generations and comes to face the dilemma of whether the lost moments those lives are to live on as capital or not. Though repetitions of accumulation’s process take the Proletariat further from its initiating moment of separation, it brings them necessarily to new iterations of it, and the echo of the past resonates the sense of what is being created by this negation of its own potential of living development. Vehicles for capital accumulation form to trap this generational transmission of labor’s need to realize its creative self-activity within particularist forms of solidarity that are animated by its very brokenness, such as the nation-state, a horizon of a necessary socialization, but a limit that dissolves with the achievement of Proletarian solidarity. This form of the State arises as a moment of this struggle in the historical geography of struggles within accumulation, and we learn in the convergence of this abstraction of process that emerges from the recognition of its concrete, constitutive moments an essential criteria to the evaluation of solidarity, to determine whether it is one of reaction or revolution, its place within the historical development of the Proletariat’s self-emancipation through the abolition of the necessity of its condition.

The historical confrontations of class struggle in its diverse forms show the manner by which the Proletariat may overcome the fate laid out for it by the course of capital’s accumulation, by transcending its need to preserve a life devoted to being a mere worker. As the social productive powers of labor become a property of the Collective Working Body, the conscious development of a lifetime that is not lived in perpetual crisis is the negative objective that develops from the initial negation of labor’s reproduction. This determinate negation in the Collective Working Body’s socialization of capacities is positively expressed in the free and total development of the social individual to be emancipated from knowing their labor as toil. And this only becomes possible in the unification its labor performs as creative self-activity in the solidarity of concrete moments of struggle.

“No war but class war” is only meaningful in the practical reclamation of the struggles of the oppressed as a claiming of our own. The class names itself in its own organic composition in the confrontation of its reproduction, the point at which it fights to decide who it is to become. This is how the body of this resurrection is to be formed, casting off that which must pass away of it. No individual moment of its composition is the same. The process of capital’s accumulation reveals what cannot continue of this life as it is, and it is in our collective subjection to premature death and loss that we learn what needs hold us in common across the moments of value’s differentiations. The bodies sown by this world are perishable. They will be raised imperishable, for all that which has passed on could not contain within itself alone.