If we observe the formula of capital, we easily comprehend that its conservation is placed completely in its successive and continuous reproduction.

In fact, capital is divided, as we already know, in two: into constant, that is, and variable. Constant capital, represented by the means of production and raw materials, is worn away continuously during the process of labor. Tools are used, machinery used, carbon, tallow, etc., that is needed by the machinery, and finally the building is used. At the same time, however, that the labor is able in such a way to wear away constant capital, it is also reproduced in the same proportions in which it uses it. Constant capital finds itself reproduced in the commodity in the proportions in which it was used during its production. The value used of the means of production and the raw materials is always reproduced exactly in the value of the commodity, as we have already seen elsewhere. If, therefore, constant capital comes to be partially reproduced in every commodity, it’s clear that, in the value of a certain number of manufactured commodities, one will find all of the constant capital, used in their production.

As it is with constant capital, so too with variable capital. Variable capital, that represented by the value of labor power, i.e. by salary, is also reproduced exactly in the value of the commodity. We have already seen it. The worker, in the first part of his labor, produces his salary, and in the second the surplus value. As the worker is not paid salary for that finished work, so it arises that he collects his salary after having already reproduced the equivalent in the commodity of the capitalist.

The assembly of salaries paid to workers is therefore from these endlessly reproduced. This endless reproduction behind salaries perpetuates the subjection of the worker to the capitalist. When the proletarian comes to the market to sell his labor power, he comes to take the position assigned to him by the capitalist mode of production, and to contribute to the social production through his share of the labor, withdrawing, for his maintenance, that part behind salaries, that he will have to, first, reproduce with his labor.

It is always the eternal bond of human subjection, either under the form of slavery, serfdom, or wage-worker.

The superficial observer believes that the slave labors for nothing. And he doesn’t think that the slave must above all make up to his owner how much was spent for his maintenance: and he observes that the maintenance of the slave is at times a great deal better than that of the wage-worker, his owner being highly interested in his conservation, like the conservation of a part of his own capital. The serf, who belongs to his lord, together with the land, to which he is bound, is, for the superficial observer, a being who has made progress compared to the slave, because he sees clearly that the serf gives only one part of his labor to his lord, while he employs the other part on the little land assigned to him, to live life. And being a wage-worker, in turn, appears to the superficial observer, a state much further progressed compared to slavery, because the worker seems perfectly free in it, collecting the value of his own labor.

What a strange illusion! If the worker could realize for himself the value of his own labor, the capitalist mode of production would not be able to exist any longer. We have already seen it. The worker is only able to obtain the value of his labor power, which is the only thing that he can sell, because it is the only good that he possesses in the world. The product of labor belongs to the capitalist, who pays salary to the proletarian, i.e. his maintenance. In the same way, the piece of land left by the lord to his serf, as well as the time and tools necessary to work it, are the sum of the means that he has to live, while he must labor for his lord the rest of the time.

The slave, serf and worker all labor in part to produce their maintenance, and in part completely for the benefit of their patrons. These represent three different forms of the very same bond of human subjection and exploitation. It is always the subjection of the man without any primitive accumulation (that is of means of production, which are the means of life) to the the man who possesses a primitive accumulation, the means of production, the sources of life. Conservation, i.e. the reproduction of capital, is just, in the capitalist mode of production, the conservation of this bond of human subjection and exploitation.

Labor does not only reproduce capital, it also produces surplus value, which forms that which is called “revenue of capital”. If the capitalist blends every year all or part of his revenue with capital, we will have an accumulation of capital, which will grow progressively. With simple reproduction labor conserves capital; with accumulation of surplus value labor increases capital.

When one re-incorporates the revenue with capital, one comes to use this revenue, partially in the means of production, partially in raw materials and partially in labor power. Now you have that the past overwork, past unpaid labor, increases the whole capital. One part of last year’s unpaid labor pays this year’s necessary work. Here is what the capitalist is able to do, thanks to the ingenious mechanism of modern production.

Once the system of modern production is admitted, all based upon private property and the wage-worker, nothing can be said about the consequences that derive from it, one of which is capitalist accumulation. Is it important to the worker Antonio if the 3 lire that are paid to him as salary represent the worker Peter’s unpaid labor? What he has a right to know is if the 3 lire are the right price of his labor power, i.e. if they are the exact equivalent of the things necessary to him in a day, if the law of exchange, in a word, was observed rigorously.

When the capitalist begins to accumulate capital upon capital, a new virtue, all rightly his, develops in him; the so-called “virtue of abstinence”, which consists of limiting all of his own expenses, to use the greater part of his revenue on accumulation. “So far, therefore, as his actions are a mere function of capital — endowed as capital is, in his person, with consciousness and a will — his own private consumption is a robbery perpetrated on accumulation, just as in book-keeping by double entry, the private expenditure of the capitalist is placed on the debtor side of his account against his capital. To accumulate, is to conquer the world of social wealth, to increase the mass of human beings exploited by him, and thus to extend both the direct and the indirect sway of the capitalist” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 24, sec. 3).

“Taking the usurer, that old-fashioned but ever renewed specimen of the capitalist for his text, Luther shows very aptly that the love of power is an element in the desire to get rich. ‘The heathen were able, by the light of reason, to conclude that a usurer is a double-dyed thief and murderer. We Christians, however, hold them in such honor, that we fairly worship them for the sake of their money.... Whoever eats up, robs, and steals the nourishment of another, that man commits as great a murder (so far as in him lies) as he who starves a man or utterly undoes him. Such does a usurer, and sits the while safe on his stool, when he ought rather to be hanging on the gallows, and be eaten by as many ravens as he has stolen guilders, if only there were so much flesh on him, that so many ravens could stick their beaks in and share it. Meanwhile, we hang the small thieves.... Little thieves are put in the stocks, great thieves go flaunting in gold and silk.... Therefore is there, on this earth, no greater enemy of man (after the devil) than a gripe-money, and usurer, for he wants to be God over all men. Turks, soldiers, and tyrants are also bad men, yet must they let the people live, and Confess that they are bad, and enemies, and do, nay, must, now and then show pity to some. But a usurer and money-glutton, such a one would have the whole world perish of hunger and thirst, misery and want, so far as in him lies, so that he may have all to himself, and every one may receive from him as from a God, and be his serf for ever. To wear fine cloaks, golden chains, rings, to wipe his mouth, to be deemed and taken for a worthy, pious man .... Usury is a great huge monster, like a werewolf, who lays waste all, more than any Cacus, Gerion or Antus... And since we break on the wheel, and behead highwaymen, murderers and housebreakers, how much more ought we to break on the wheel and kill.... hunt down, curse and behead all usurers’” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 24, fn. 20).

Capitalist accumulation requires an increase of hands. The number of workers must be increased, if one wishes to convert a part of the revenue into variable capital. The same organism of capitalist reproduction performs in a way that the worker is able to conserve his labor power in the new generation, from which capital takes labor power in order to continue its endless process of reproduction. But the labor that is required today by capital is higher that that which was required yesterday; and consequently its price would naturally have to increase. And in fact wages would have to increase, if in the same accumulation of capital there were not a reason to make them decrease instead.

It’s true that revenue would have to be converted, partially into constant capital, and partially into variable capital; partially, that is, into the means of production and raw materials, and partially into labor power, but it must be considered that with the accumulation of capital come perfections of the old systems of production, new systems of production and machinery; all things that make production grow, and lessen the price of labor power, like we already know. To the extent that the accumulation of capital grows, its variable part shrinks, while its constant part increases. That is, the buildings, the machinery with its auxiliary materials increase, the raw materials increase, but, at the same time and in proportion to this increase, with the the accumulation of capital the need for labor power decreases, the need of hands. Decreasing the need of labor power diminishes the demand for it and finally it also lowers its price. One has, therefore, that the more the accumulation of capital progresses, the more the wages go down.

The accumulation of capital takes vast amounts of competition and credit. Credit spontaneously brings more capital to merge together, or to merge together with one stronger than any of the others. Competition, instead, is the war that all of the capitalists wage between themselves; it is there struggle for existence, from which emerge those who, to win, had to already be the stronger ones before, rendered even stronger.

The accumulation of capital, therefore, makes a great number of hands useless; it creates, that is, a surplus laboring population. “But if a surplus laboring population is a necessary product of accumulation or of the development of wealth on a capitalist basis, this surplus population becomes, conversely, the lever of capitalistic accumulation, nay, a condition of existence of the capitalist mode of production. It forms a disposable industrial reserve army, that belongs to capital quite as absolutely as if the latter had bred it at its own cost. Independently of the limits of the actual increase of population, it creates, for the changing needs of the self-expansion of capital, a mass of human material always ready for exploitation. With accumulation, and the development of the productiveness of labor that accompanies it, the power of sudden expansion of capital grows also” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 25, sec. 3).

This industrial reserve army, this surplus laboring population is divided into different categories. The first of these is better-paid, and is less short of work than the others, while doing a less painful job. The last category instead is composed of workers, who find themselves occupied more rarely than all the others, and always by a more tiresome and vile job, which pays them at the lowest price that one can ever pay human labor. This last category is the most numerous, not only for the great contingent that industrial progress consigns year by year, but above all because it is composed of the most prolific amount of people, as the same fact demonstrates. “‘Poverty seems favorable to generation.’ (A. Smith.) This is even a specially wise arrangement of God, according to the gallant and witty Abbé Galiani ‘Iddio af che gli uomini che esercitano mestieri di prima utilità nascono abbondantemente.’ (Galiani, l. c., p. 78.) [God ordains that men who carry on trades of primary utility are born in abundance] ‘Misery up to the extreme point of famine and pestilence, instead of checking, tends to increase population’ (S. Laing, “National Distress,” 1844, p. 69.)” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 25, fn. 24).

After these categories none remains besides “the lowest sediment of the relative surplus population finally dwells in the sphere of pauperism.

“Exclusive of vagabonds, criminals, prostitutes, in a word, the ‘dangerous’ classes, this layer of society consists of three categories. First, those able to work. One need only glance superficially at the statistics of English pauperism to find that the quantity of paupers increases with every crisis, and diminishes with every revival of trade. Second, orphans and pauper children. These are candidates for the industrial reserve army, and are, in times of great prosperity, as 1860, e.g., speedily and in large numbers enrolled in the active army of laborers. Third, the demoralized and ragged, and those unable to work, chiefly people who succumb to their incapacity for adaptation, due to the division of labor; people who have passed the normal age of the laborer; the victims of industry, whose number increases with the increase of dangerous machinery, of mines, chemical works, &c., the mutilated, the sickly, the widows, &c. Pauperism is the hospital of the active labor-army and the dead weight of the industrial reserve army. Its production is included in that of the relative surplus population, its necessity in theirs; along with the surplus population, pauperism forms a condition of capitalist production, and of the capitalist development of wealth. It enters into the faux frais of capitalist production; but capital knows how to throw these, for the most part, from its own shoulders on to those of the working class and the lower middle class.

“The greater the social wealth, the functioning capital, the extent and energy of its growth, and, therefore, also the absolute mass of the proletariat and the productiveness of its labor, the greater is the industrial reserve army. The same causes which develop the expansive power of capital, develop also the labor power at its disposal. The relative mass of the industrial reserve army increases therefore with the potential energy of wealth. But the greater this reserve army in proportion to the active labor army, the greater is the mass of a consolidated surplus population, whose misery is in inverse ratio to its torment of labor. The more extensive, finally, the lazarus layers of the working class, and the industrial reserve army, the greater is official pauperism. This is the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation. Like all other laws it is modified in its working by many circumstances, the analysis of which does not concern us here.

“The folly is now patent of the economic wisdom that preaches to the laborers the accommodation of their number to the requirements of capital. The mechanism of capitalist production and accumulation constantly effects this adjustment. The first word of this adaptation is the creation of a relative surplus population, or industrial reserve army. Its last word is the misery of constantly extending strata of the active army of labor, and the dead weight of pauperism.

“The law by which a constantly increasing quantity of means of production, thanks to the advance in the productiveness of social labor, may be set in movement by a progressively diminishing expenditure of human power, this law, in a capitalist society — where the laborer does not employ the means of production, but the means of production employ the laborer — undergoes a complete inversion and is expressed thus: the higher the productiveness of labor, the greater is the pressure of the laborers on the means of employment, the more precarious, therefore, becomes their condition of existence, viz., the sale of their own labor power for the increasing of another’s wealth, or for the self-expansion of capital. The fact that the means of production, and the productiveness of labor, increase more rapidly than the productive population, expresses itself, therefore, capitalistically in the inverse form that the laboring population always increases more rapidly than the conditions under which capital can employ this increase for its own self-expansion.

“We saw in Part IV., when analyzing the production of relative surplus-value: within the capitalist system all methods for raising the social productiveness of labor are brought about at the cost of the individual laborer; all means for the development of production transform themselves into means of domination over, and exploitation of, the producers; they mutilate the laborer into a fragment of a man, degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, destroy every remnant of charm in his work and turn it into a hated toil; they estrange from him the intellectual potentialities of the labor process in the same proportion as science is incorporated in it as an independent power; they distort the conditions under which he works, subject him during the labor process to a despotism the more hateful for its meanness; they transform his life-time into working-time, and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the Juggernaut of capital. But all methods for the production of surplus-value are at the same time methods of accumulation; and every extension of accumulation becomes again a means for the development of those methods. It follows therefore that in proportion as capital accumulates, the lot of the laborer, be his payment high or low, must grow worse. The law, finally, that always equilibrates the relative surplus population, or industrial reserve army, to the extent and energy of accumulation, this law rivets the laborer to capital more firmly than the wedges of Vulcan did Prometheus to the rock. It establishes an accumulation of misery, corresponding with accumulation of capital. Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole, i.e., on the side of the class that produces its own product in the form of capital. This antagonistic character of capitalistic accumulation is enunciated in various forms by political economists, although by them it is confounded with phenomena, certainly to some extent analogous, but nevertheless essentially distinct, and belonging to pre-capitalistic modes of production.

“The Venetian monk Ortes, one of the great economic writers of the 18^th century, regards the antagonism of capitalist production as a general natural law of social wealth.

“‘In the economy of a nation, advantages and evils always balance one another (il bene ed il male economico in una nazione semper all, istessa misura): the abundance of wealth with some people, is always equal to the want of it with others (la copia dei beni in alcuni semper eguale alia mancanza di essi in altri): the great riches of a small number are always accompanied by the absolute privation of the first necessaries of life for many others. The wealth of a nation corresponds with its population, and its misery corresponds with its wealth. Diligence in some compels idleness in others. The poor and idle are a necessary consequence of the rich and active,’ &c.In a thoroughly brutal way about 10 years after Ortes, the Church of England parson, Townsend, glorified misery as a necessary condition of wealth.

“‘Legal constraint (to labor) is attended with too much trouble, violence, and noise, whereas hunger is not only a peaceable, silent, unremitted pressure, but as the most natural motive to industry and labor, it calls forth the most powerful exertions.’

“Everything therefore depends upon making hunger permanent among the working class, and for this, according to Townsend, the principle of population, especially active among the poor, provides.

“‘It seems to be a law of Nature that the poor should be to a certain degree improvident’ [i.e., so improvident as to be born without a silver spoon in the mouth], ‘that there may always be some to fulfill the most servile, the most sordid, and the most ignoble offices in the community. The stock of human happiness is thereby much increased, whilst the more delicate are not only relieved from drudgery ... but are left at liberty without interruption to pursue those callings which are suited to their various dispositions ... it’ [the Poor Law] ‘tends to destroy the harmony and beauty, the symmetry and order of that system which God and Nature have established in the world.’ If the Venetian monk found in the fatal destiny that makes misery eternal, the raison d’être of Christian charity, celibacy, monasteries and holy houses, the Protestant prebendary finds in it a pretext for condemning the laws in virtue of which the poor possessed a right to a miserable public relief.

“‘The progress of social wealth,’ says Storch, ‘begets this useful class of society ... which performs the most wearisome, the vilest, the most disgusting functions, which takes, in a word, on its shoulders all that is disagreeable and servile in life, and procures thus for other classes leisure, serenity of mind and conventional’ [c’est bon!] ‘dignity of character.’

“Storch asks himself in what then really consists the progress of this capitalistic civilization with its misery and its degradation of the masses, as compared with barbarism. He finds but one answer: security!

“‘Thanks to the advance of industry and science,’ says Sismondi, ‘every laborer can produce every day much more than his consumption requires. But at the same time, whilst his labor produces wealth, that wealth would, were he called on to consume it himself, make him less fit for labor.’ According to him, ‘men’ [i.e., non-workers] ‘would probably prefer to do without all artistic perfection, and all the enjoyments that manufacturers procure for us, if it were necessary that all should buy them by constant toil like that of the laborer.... Exertion today is separated from its recompense; it is not the same man that first works, and then reposes; but it is because the one works that the other rests.... The indefinite multiplication of the productive powers of labor can then only have for result the increase of luxury and enjoyment of the idle rich.’

“Finally Destutt de Tracy, the fish-blooded bourgeois doctrinaire, blurts out brutally:

“‘In poor nations the people are comfortable, in rich nations they are generally poor’” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 25, sec. 4).

We now come to see, in the facts, what the effect of the accumulation of capital are. Here, as elsewhere, our examples are all taken from England, the preeminent country of the accumulation of capital, towards which (let’s repeat it, and never forget it) all modern nations tend. I regret that I’m only able to reproduce only a small part of the rich material gathered by Marx.

“In the year 1863, the Privy Council ordered an inquiry into the state of distress of the worst-nourished part of the English working class. Dr. Simon, medical officer to the Privy Council, chose for this work the above-mentioned Dr. Smith. His inquiry ranges on the one hand over the agricultural laborers, on the other, over silk-weavers, needlewomen, kid-glovers, stocking-weavers, glove-weavers, and shoemakers. The latter categories are, with the exception of the stocking-weavers, exclusively town-dwellers. It was made a rule in the inquiry to select in each category the most healthy families, and those comparatively in the best circumstances.

“As a general result it was found that

“‘in only one of the examined classes of in-door operatives did the average nitrogen supply just exceed, while in another it nearly reached, the estimated standard of bare sufficiency [i.e., sufficient to avert starvation diseases], and that in two classes there was defect — in one, a very large defect — of both nitrogen and carbon. Moreover, as regards the examined families of the agricultural population, it appeared that more than a fifth were with less than the estimated sufficiency of carbonaceous food, that more than one-third were with less than the estimated sufficiency of nitrogenous food, and that in three counties (Berkshire, Oxfordshire, and Somersetshire), insufficiency of nitrogenous food was the average local diet.’

“Among the agricultural laborers, those of England, the wealthiest part of the United Kingdom, were the worst fed. The insufficiency of food among the agricultural laborers, fell, as a rule, chiefly on the women and children, for ‘the man must eat to do his work.’ Still greater penury ravaged the town-workers examined.

“‘They are so ill fed that assuredly among them there must be many cases of severe and injurious privation.’

“(‘Privation’ of the capitalist all this! i.e., ‘abstinence’ from paying for the means of subsistence absolutely necessary for the mere vegetation of his ‘hands’) …

“Dr. Simon in his General Health Report says:

“‘That cases are innumerable in which defective diet is the cause or the aggravator of disease, can be affirmed by any one who is conversant with poor law medical practice, or with the wards and out-patient rooms of hospitals.... Yet in this point of view, there is, in my opinion, a very important sanitary context to be added. It must be remembered that privation of food is very reluctantly borne, and that as a rule great poorness of diet will only come when other privations have preceded it. Long before insufficiency of diet is a matter of hygienic concern, long before the physiologist would think of counting the grains of nitrogen and carbon which intervene between life and starvation, the household will have been utterly destitute of material comfort; clothing and fuel will have been even scantier than food — against inclemencies of weather there will have been no adequate protection — dwelling space will have been stinted to the degree in which overcrowding produces or increases disease; of household utensils and furniture there will have been scarcely any — even cleanliness will have been found costly or difficult, and if there still be self-respectful endeavors to maintain it, every such endeavor will represent additional pangs of hunger. The home, too, will be where shelter can be cheapest bought; in quarters where commonly there is least fruit of sanitary supervision, least drainage, least scavenging, least suppression of public nuisances, least or worst water supply, and, if in town, least light and air. Such are the sanitary dangers to which poverty is almost certainly exposed, when it is poverty enough to imply scantiness of food. And while the sum of them is of terrible magnitude against life, the mere scantiness of food is in itself of very serious moment.... These are painful reflections, especially when it is remembered that the poverty to which they advert is not the deserved poverty of idleness. In all cases it is the poverty of working populations. Indeed, as regards the in-door operatives, the work which obtains the scanty pittance of food, is for the most part excessively prolonged. Yet evidently it is only in a qualified sense that the work can be deemed self-supporting.... And on a very large scale the nominal self-support can be only a circuit, longer or shorter, to pauperism …”

“Every unprejudiced observer sees that the greater the centralization of the means of production, the greater is the corresponding heaping together of the laborers, within a given space; that therefore the swifter capitalistic accumulation, the more miserable are the dwellings of the working-people. ‘Improvements’ of towns, accompanying the increase of wealth, by the demolition of badly built quarters, the erection of palaces for banks, warehouses, &c., the widening of streets for business traffic, for the carriages of luxury, and for the introduction of tramways, &c., drive away the poor into even worse and more crowded hiding places.

“I quote, as preliminary, a general remark of Dr. Simon.

“‘Although my official point of view,’ he says, ‘is one exclusively physical, common humanity requires that the other aspect of this evil should not be ignored .... In its higher degrees it [i.e., over-crowding] almost necessarily involves such negation of all delicacy, such unclean confusion of bodies and bodily functions, such exposure of animal and sexual nakedness, as is rather bestial than human. To be subject to these influences is a degradation which must become deeper and deeper for those on whom it continues to work. To children who are born under its curse, it must often be a very baptism into infamy. And beyond all measure hopeless is the wish that persons thus circumstanced should ever in other respects aspire to that atmosphere of civilization which has its essence in physical and moral cleanliness’” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 25, sec. 5B).

“We turn now to a class of people whose origin is agricultural, but whose occupation is in great part industrial. They are the light infantry of capital, thrown by it, according to its needs, now to this point, now to that. When they are not on the march, they “camp.” Nomad labor is used for various operations of building and draining, brick-making, lime-burning, railway-making, &c. A flying column of pestilence, it carries into the places in whose neighborhood it pitches its camp, small-pox, typhus, cholera, scarlet fever, &c. In undertakings that involve much capital outlay, such as railways, &c., the contractor himself generally provides his army with wooden huts and the like, thus improvising villages without any sanitary provisions, outside the control of the local boards, very profitable to the contractor, who exploits the laborers in two-fold fashion — as soldiers of industry and as tenants. According as the wooden hut contains 1, 2, or 3 holes, its inhabitant, navvy, or whatever he may be, has to pay 1, 3, or 4 shillings weekly. One example will suffice. In September, 1864, Dr. Simon reports that the Chairman of the Nuisances Removal Committee of the parish of Sevenoaks sent the following denunciation to Sir George Gray, Home Secretary: —

“‘Small-pox cases were rarely heard of in this parish until about twelve months ago. Shortly before that time, the works for a railway from Lewisham to Tunbridge were commenced here, and, in addition to the principal works being in the immediate neighborhood of this town, here was also established the depôt for the whole of the works, so that a large number of persons was of necessity employed here. As cottage accommodation could not be obtained for them all, huts were built in several places along the line of the works by the contractor, Mr. Jay, for their especial occupation. These huts possessed no ventilation nor drainage, and, besides, were necessarily over-crowded, because each occupant had to accommodate lodgers, whatever the number in his own family might be, although there were only two rooms to each tenement. The consequences were, according to the medical report we received, that in the nighttime these poor people were compelled to endure all the horror of suffocation to avoid the pestiferous smells arising from the filthy, stagnant water, and the privies close under their windows. Complaints were at length made to the Nuisances Removal Committee by a medical gentleman who had occasion to visit these huts, and he spoke of their condition as dwellings in the most severe terms, and he expressed his fears that some very serious consequences might ensue, unless some sanitary measures were adopted. About a year ago, Mr. Jay promised to appropriate a hut, to which persons in his employ, who were suffering from contagious diseases, might at once be removed. He repeated that promise on the 23^rd July last, but although since the date of the last Promise there have been several cases of small-pox in his huts, and two deaths from the same disease, yet he has taken no steps whatever to carry out his promise. On the 9^th September instant, Mr. Kelson, surgeon, reported to me further cases of small-pox in the same huts, and he described their condition as most disgraceful. I should add, for your (the Home Secretary’s) information that an isolated house, called the Pest-house, which is set apart for parishioners who might be suffering from infectious diseases, has been continually occupied by such patients for many months past, and is also now occupied; that in one family five children died from small-pox and fever; that from the 1^st April to the 1^st September this year, a period of five months, there have been no fewer than ten deaths from small-pox in the parish, four of them being in the huts already referred to; that it is impossible to ascertain the exact number of persons who have suffered from that disease although they are known to be many, from the fact of the families keeping it as private as possible’” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 25, sec. 5C).

Let’s now see the effects of the crises on the better-paid part of the working class. Here much is told by a correspondent of a newspaper, the Morning Star, who, in January 1867, on the occasion of an industrial crisis, visited the main localities in distress.

“‘In the East End districts of Poplar, Millwall, Greenwich, Deptford, Limehouse and Canning Town, at least 15,000 workmen and their families were in a state of utter destitution, and 3,000 skilled mechanics were breaking stones in the workhouse yard (after distress of over half a year’s duration).... I had great difficulty in reaching the workhouse door, for a hungry crowd besieged it.... They were waiting for their tickets, but the time had not yet arrived for the distribution. The yard was a great square place with an open shed running all round it, and several large heaps of snow covered the paving-stones in the middle. In the middle, also, were little wicker-fenced spaces, like sheep pens, where in finer weather the men worked; but on the day of my visit the pens were so snowed up that nobody could sit in them. Men were busy, however, in the open shed breaking paving-stones into macadam. Each man had a big paving-stone for a seat, and he chipped away at the rime-covered granite with a big hammer until he had broken up, and think! five bushels of it, and then he had done his day’s work, and got his day’s pay — threepence and an allowance of food. In another part of the yard was a rickety little wooden house, and when we opened the door of it, we found it filled with men who were huddled together shoulder to shoulder for the warmth of one another’s bodies and breath. They were picking oakum and disputing the while as to which could work the longest on a given quantity of food — for endurance was the point of honor. Seven thousand ... in this one workhouse ... were recipients of relief ... many hundreds of them ... it appeared, were, six or eight months ago, earning the highest wages paid to artisans.... Their number would be more than doubled by the count of those who, having exhausted all their savings, still refuse to apply to the parish, because they have a little left to pawn. Leaving the workhouse, I took a walk through the streets, mostly of little one-story houses, that abound in the neighborhood of Poplar. My guide was a member of the Committee of the Unemployed.... My first call was on an ironworker who had been seven and twenty weeks out of employment. I found the man with his family sitting in a little back room. The room was not bare of furniture, and there was a fire in it. This was necessary to keep the naked feet of the young children from getting frost bitten, for it was a bitterly cold day. On a tray in front of the fire lay a quantity of oakum, which the wife and children were picking in return for their allowance from the parish. The man worked in the stone yard of the workhouse for a certain ration of food, and threepence per day. He had now come home to dinner quite hungry, as he told us with a melancholy smile, and his dinner consisted of a couple of slices of bread and dripping, and a cup of milkless tea.... The next door at which we knocked was opened by a middle-aged woman, who, without saying a word, led us into a little back parlor, in which sat all her family, silent and fixedly staring at a rapidly dying fire. Such desolation, such hopelessness was about these people and their little room, as I should not care to witness again. “Nothing have they done, sir,” said the woman, pointing to her boys, “for six and twenty weeks; and all our money gone — all the twenty pounds that me and father saved when times were better, thinking it would yield a little to keep us when we got past work. Look at it,” she said, almost fiercely, bringing out a bank-book with all its well kept entries of money paid in, and money taken out, so that we could see how the little fortune had begun with the first five shilling deposit, and had grown by little and little to be twenty pounds, and how it had melted down again till the sum in hand got from pounds to shillings, and the last entry made the book as worthless as a blank sheet. This family received relief from the workhouse, and it furnished them with just one scanty meal per day.... Our next visit was to an iron laborer’s wife, whose husband had worked in the yards. We found her ill from want of food, lying on a mattress in her clothes, and just covered with a strip of carpet, for all the bedding had been pawned. Two wretched children were tending her, themselves looking as much in need of nursing as their mother. Nineteen weeks of enforced idleness had brought them to this pass, and while the mother told the history of that bitter past, she moaned as if all her faith in a future that should atone for it were dead.... On getting outside a young fellow came running after us, and asked us to step inside his house and see if anything could be done for him. A young wife, two pretty children, a cluster of pawn-tickets, and a bare room were all he had to show’ …

“As it is the fashion among English capitalists to quote Belgium as the Paradise of the laborer because ‘freedom of labor,’ or what is the same thing, ‘freedom of capital,’ is there limited neither by the despotism of Trades’ Unions, nor by Factory Acts, a word or two on the ‘happiness’ of the Belgian laborer. Assuredly no one was more thoroughly initiated in the mysteries of this happiness than the late M. Ducpétiaux, inspector-general of Belgian prisons and charitable institutions, and member of the central commission of Belgian statistics. Let us take his work: ‘Budgets économiques des classes ouvrières de la Belgique,’ Bruxelles, 1855. Here we find among other matters, a normal Belgian laborer’s family, whose yearly income and expenditure he calculates on very exact data, and whose conditions of nourishment are then compared with those of the soldier, sailor, and prisoner …

“‘Calculated at this rate, the resources of the family would amount, at the maximum, to 1,068 francs a-year …’

“According to this the budget of the family is:

	Total	fr. 1,068
The father	300 working-days at fr. 1.56	fr. 468
mother	300 working-days at fr. 0.89	fr. 267
boy	300 working-days at fr. 0.56	fr. 168
girl	300 working-days at fr. 0.55	fr. 165

“The annual expenditure of the family would cause a deficit upon the hypothesis that the laborer has the food of:

The man-of-war’s man	fr. 1,828	Deficit fr. 760
The soldier	fr. 1,473	Deficit fr. 405
The prisoner	fr. 1,112	Deficit fr. 44

“‘From an elaborate comparison between the diet of convicts in the convict prisons in England, and that of paupers in workhouses and of free laborers in the same country ... it certainly appears that the former are much better fed than either of the two other classes,’ whilst ‘the amount of labor required from an ordinary convict under penal servitude is about one half of what would be done by an ordinary day-laborer’” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 25, sec. 5E).

A report on Public Health, from 1865, speaks of a visit made in a time of epidemic to houses of farmers, citing among others the following :

“‘A young woman having fever, lay at night in a room occupied by her father and mother, her bastard child, two young men (her brothers), and her two sisters, each with a bastard child — 10 persons in all. A few weeks ago 13 persons slept in it’” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 25, sec. 5E).

The modest size of this summary does not permit me to report here, from the text, the minute aspects of the horrible state in which the farmers of England lie.

Let’s close, therefore, this chapter, speaking of a completely special plight, produced in England, among agricultural workers, by the accumulation of capital.

The surplus agricultural population produces the effect of making wages sink, while not even satisfying all of the needs of capital in exceptional and urgent moments of labor, which are required in a given period of the year from agriculture. It follows, therefore, that a great number of women and children come to be employed for the momentary need of capital, past which, these people go on to increase the counties’ overpopulation of workers. This fact has produced the system of organized gangs in the counties of England.

“The gang consists of 10 to 40 or 50 persons, women, young persons of both sexes (13–18 years of age, although the boys are for the most part eliminated at the age of 13), and children of both sexes (6–13 years of age). At the head is the gang-master, always an ordinary agricultural laborer, generally what is called a bad lot, a scapegrace, unsteady, drunken, but with a dash of enterprise and savoir-faire. He is the recruiting-sergeant for the gang, which works under him, not under the farmer. He generally arranges with the latter for piece-work, and his income, which on the average is not very much above that of an ordinary agricultural laborer, depends almost entirely upon the dexterity with which he manages to extract within the shortest time the greatest possible amount of labor from his gang. The farmers have discovered that women work steadily only under the direction of men, but that women and children, once set going, impetuously spend their life-force — as Fourier knew — while the adult male laborer is shrewd enough to economize his as much as he can. The gang-master goes from one farm to another, and thus employs his gang from 6 to 8 months in the year. Employment by him is, therefore, much more lucrative and more certain for the laboring families, than employment by the individual farmer, who only employs children occasionally. This circumstance so completely rivets his influence in the open villages that children are generally only to be hired through his instrumentality…

“The “drawbacks” of the system are the overwork of the children and young persons, the enormous marches that they make daily to and from the farms, 5, 6, and sometimes 7 miles distant, finally, the demoralization of the gang. Although the gang-master, who, in some districts is called “the driver,” is armed with a long stick, he uses it but seldom, and complaints of brutal treatment are exceptional. He is a democratic emperor, or a kind of Pied Piper of Hamelin. He must therefore be popular with his subjects, and he binds them to himself by the charms of the gypsy life under his direction. Coarse freedom, a noisy jollity, and obscenest impudence give attractions to the gang. Generally the gangmaster pays up in a public house; then he returns home at the head of the procession reeling drunk, propped up right and left by a stalwart virago, while children and young persons bring up the rear, boisterous, and singing chaffing and bawdy songs. On the return journey what Fourier calls “phanerogamie,” is the order of the day. The getting with child of girls of 13 and 14 by their male companions of the same age, is common. The open villages which supply the contingent of the gang, become Sodoms and Gomorrahs, and have twice as high a rate of illegitimate births as the rest of the kingdom…

“The gang in its classical form just described, is called the public, common, or tramping gang. For there are also private gangs. These are made up in the same way as the common gang, but count fewer members, and work, not under a gang-master, but under some old farm servant, whom the farmer does not know how to employ in any better way. The gypsy fun has vanished here, but according to all witnesses, the payment and treatment of the children is worse.

“The gang-system, which during the last years has steadily increased, clearly does not exist for the sake of the gang-master. It exists for the enrichment of the large farmers, and indirectly of the landlords” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 25, sec. 5E).

“‘Small farmers never employ gangs.’ ‘It is not on poor land, but on land which affords rent of from 40 to 50 shillings, that women and children are employed in the greatest numbers’” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 25, fn. 114).

“To one of these gentlemen the taste of his rent was so grateful that he indignantly declared to the Commission of Inquiry that the hole hubbub was only due to the name of the system. If instead of ‘gang’ it were called ‘the Agricultural Juvenile Industrial Self-supporting Association,’ everything would be all right” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 25, fn. 115).

“‘Gang work is cheaper than other work; that is why they are employed,’ says a former gang-master. ‘The gang-system is decidedly the cheapest for the farmer, and decidedly the worst for the children,’ says a farmer” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 25, fn. 116).

“For the farmer there is no more ingenious method of keeping his laborers well below the normal level, and yet of always having an extra hand ready for extra work, of extracting the greatest possible amount of labor with the least possible amount of money and of making adult male labor ‘redundant.’ From the exposition already made, it will be understood why, on the one hand, a greater or less lack of employment for the agricultural laborer is admitted, while on the other, the gang-system is at the same time declared ‘necessary’ on account of the want of adult male labor and its migration to the towns” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 25, sec. 5E).