Key Arguments

• The process incessantly forces the worker to sell labor-power to live
• It enables the capitalist to purchase labor to enrich himself
• It reproduces the separation between labor-power and the means of production

Source Quotes

His economic bondage is at once mediated through, and concealed by, the periodic renewal of the act by which he sells himself, his change of masters, and the oscillations in the market-price of his labour. The capitalist process of production, therefore, seen as a total, connected process, i.e. a process of reproduction, produces not only commodities, not only surplus-value, but it also produces and reproduces the capital-relation itself; on the one hand the capitalist, on

They were locked up in that ‘moral workhouse’, the cotton districts, and they form, as before, ‘the strength’ of the cotton manufacturers of Lancashire. Capitalist production therefore reproduces in the course of its own process the separation between labour-power and the conditions of labour. It thereby reproduces and perpetuates the conditions under which the worker is exploited.

It is the alternating rhythm of the process itself which throws the worker back onto the market again and again as a seller of his labour-power and continually transforms his own product into a means by which another man can purchase him. In reality, the worker belongs to capital before he has sold himself to the capitalist. His economic bondage is at once mediated through, and concealed by, the periodic renewal of the act by which he sells himself, his change of masters, and the oscillations in the market-price of his labour.

Key Concepts

• produces not only commodities, not only surplus-value, but it also produces and reproduces the capital-relation itself
• reproduces in the course of its own process the separation between labour-power and the conditions of labour
• worker belongs to capital before he has sold himself to the capitalist

Context

Marx concluding Chapter 23 by summarizing the cyclical nature of capitalist reproduction as a generator of class structure