Capitalist Simple Reproduction

Reproduction in which the capitalist uses all the surplus-value created by the laborer in the production process for personal consumption, so that reproduction continues to be repeated on the original scale. The analysis of capitalist reproduction must begin with simple reproduction. Simple reproduction is the basis and starting point of expanded reproduction, a component part of expanded reproduction.

First, the analysis of simple reproduction reveals some new features of the labor-capital relationship, where the variable capital paid by the capitalist to the worker in the form of wages, is created by the worker’s own labor. The wage paid in advance by the capitalist for the purchase of labor is not paid in the capitalist’s own money, but in the money transformed from the laborer’s previous products of labor.

Second, laborers create not only variable capital, but also entire capital. Even in the case of simple reproduction, the aggregate capital advanced, regardless of its source, is transformed into accumulated capital or capitalized surplus-value, which is accumulated from the surplus-value created by the laborers. The capitalist class appropriates the surplus-value produced by the working class without paying its equivalent and without compensation.

Finally, the process of simple reproduction is also the process of reproduction of capitalist relations of production.

Marx pointed out blow for blow: “Capitalist production, therefore, under its aspect of a continuous connected process, of a process of reproduction, produces not only commodities, not only surplus-value, but it also produces and reproduces the capitalist relation; on the one side the capitalist, on the other the wage-laborer.” That is, it reproduces the separation between the labor-power and the means of labor. It thereby reproduces and perpetuates the condition for exploiting the laborer. It incessantly forces him to sell his labor-power in order to live, and enables the capitalist to purchase labor-power in order that he may enrich himself. The apologist capitalist theory of reproduction is a refuge for “the capitalist provides for the worker”.