part of capital, or, more
briefly, _constant capital_.

On the other hand, that part of capital represented by labour-power
does, in the process of production, undergo an alteration of value. It
both reproduces the equivalent of its own value, and also produces an
excess, a surplus value, which may itself vary. This part of capital is
continually being transformed from a constant into a variable magnitude.
I therefore call it the variable part of capital, or, shortly, _variable
capital_.

_IV.--Accumulation of Capital_

The first condition of the accumulation of capital is that the
capitalist must have contrived to sell his commodities, and to
re-convert the greater portion of the money thus received into capital.
Whatever be the proportion of surplus-value which the industrial
capitalist retains for himself or yields up to others, he is the one
who, in the first instance, appropriates it.

The process of production incessantly converts material wealth into
capital, into means of creating more wealth and means of enjoyment for
the capitalist. On the other hand, the labourer, on quitting the
process, is nothing more than he was when he began it. He is a source of
wealth, but has not the slightest means of making wealth his own. The
product of the labourer is incessantly converted not only into
commodities, but into capital, into means of subsistence that buy the
labourer, and into means of production that command the producers.

The capitalist as constantly produces labour-power; in short, he
produces the labourer, but as a wage-labourer. This incessant
reproduction, this perpetuation of the labourer, is the _sine qua non_
of capitalist production.

From a social point of view, the working-class is just as much an
appendage of capital as the ordinary instruments of labour. The
appearance of independence is kept up by means of a constant change of
employers, and by the legal fiction of a contract. In former times
capital legislatively enforced its proprietary rights over the free
labourer.

Capitalist production reproduces and perpetuates the condition for
exploiting the labourer. The economical bondage of the labourer is both
caused and hidden by the periodic sale of himself to changing masters.
Capitalist production, under its aspect of a continuous connected
process, produces not only commodities, not only surplus value, but it
also produces and reproduces the capitalist relation; on the one side
the capit