CHAPTER XIX

And again: “The labourers when driven out of the workshop by machinery, are thrown upon the labour-market, and there add to the number of workmen at the disposal of the capitalists. In Part VII. of this book it will be seen 263 that this effect of machinery, which, as we have seen, is represented to be a compensation to the working class, is on the contrary a most frightful scourge. For the present, I will only say this: The labourers that are thrown out of work in any branch of industry, can no doubt seek for employment in some other branch. If they find it, and thus renew the bond between them and the means of subsistence, this takes place only by the intermediary of a new and additional capital that is seeking investment; not at all by the intermediary of the capital that formerly employed them, and was afterwards converted into machinery.” The remainder of this Part V. of Marx deals with various questions connected with the Great Industry, and the changes produced by it on Society. Part VI. deals with the transformation of the value or price of labour-power into wages; with time wages, piece wages, and the national differences of wages. Part VII. deals with the important subject of the accumulation of capital; first, with its simple reproduction, afterwards with the 264 conversion of surplus-value itself back into capital, and with the transition of the laws of property, that characterise the production of commodities, into the laws of capitalistic appropriation. This part also contains a sarcastic refutation of the now exploded stupidity (scarcely to be called a theory) of “abstinence” as the source of interest; it also deals with the old wages-fund theory and other fallacies of bourgeois economy, concluding with a long and elaborate chapter on the general law of capitalistic accumulation in its various aspects. The last Part (XIII) treats of the socalled primitive accumulation, of which Marx says: “This primitive accumulation plays in political economy about the same part as original sin in theology. Adam bit the apple, and thereupon