Activity

A noticeable increase in wages presupposes a rapid growth of productive
capital. The rapid growth of productive capital brings about an equally rapid
growth of wealth, luxury, social wants, social enjoyments. Thus, although the
enjoyments of the worker have risen, the social satisfaction that th…

The indispensable condition for a tolerable situation of the worker is,
therefore, the fastest possible growth of productive capital.

But what is the growth of productive capital? Growth of the power of
accumulated labour over living labour. Growth of the domination of the bourgeoisie over the…

It is only the domination of accumulated, past, materialized labour over
direct, living labour that turns accumulated labour into capital.

Capital does not consist in accumulated labour serving living labour as a
means for new production. It consists in living labour serving accumulated
labou…

Capital, also, is a social relation of production. It is a bourgeois production
relation, a production relation of bourgeois society. Are not the means of
subsistence, the instruments of labour, the raw materials of which capital con-
sists, produced and accumulated under given social conditions…

[...] machines can only develop in opposition to living labour, as a hostile power and alien property, i.e. they must, as capital, oppose the worker. But it is equally easy to see that machines do not cease to be agents of social production, once they become, for example, the property of associated…