Growth of capital involves growth of its variable constituent or of the part
 invested in labour power. A part of the surplus-value turned into additional
 capital must always be re-transformed into variable capital, or additional
 labour fund. If we suppose that, all other circumstances remaining the same,
 the composition of capital also remains constant (i.e., that a
 definite mass of means of production constantly needs the same mass of labour
 power to set it in motion), then the demand for labour and the subsistence-fund
 of the labourers clearly increase in the same proportion as the capital, and
 the more rapidly, the more rapidly the capital increases. Since the capital
 produces yearly a surplus-value, of which one part is yearly added to the
 original capital; since this increment itself grows yearly along with the
 augmentation of the capital already functioning; since lastly, under special
 stimulus to enrichment, such as the opening of new markets, or of new spheres
 for the outlay of capital in consequence of newly developed social wants,
 &c., the scale of accumulation may be suddenly extended, merely by a change
 in the division of the surplus-value or surplus-product into capital and
 revenue, the requirements of accumulating capital may exceed the increase of
 labour power or of the number of labourers; the demand for labourers may exceed
 the supply, and, therefore, wages may rise. This must, indeed, ultimately be
 the case if the conditions supposed above continue. For since in each year more
 labourers are employed than in its predecessor, sooner or later a point must be
 reached, at which the requirements of accumulation begin to surpass the
 customary supply of labour, and, therefore, a rise of wages takes place. A
 lamentation on this score was heard in England during the whole of the
 fifteenth, and the first half of the eighteenth centuries. The more or less
 favourable circumstances in which the wage working class supports and
 multiplies itself, in no way alter the fundamental character of capitalist
 production. As simple reproduction constantly reproduces the
 capital relation itself, i.e., the relation of capitalists on the one
 hand, and wage workers on the other, so reproduction on a progressive scale,
 i.e., accumulation, reproduces the capital relation on a progressive
 scale, more capitalists or larger capitalists at this pole, more wage workers
 at that. The reproduction of a mass of labour power, which must incessantly
 re-incorporate itself with capital for that capital’s self-expansion;
 which cannot get free from capital, and whose enslavement to capital is only
 concealed by the variety of individual capitalists to whom it sells itself,
 this reproduction of labour power forms, in fact, 576an essential of the
 reproduction of capital itself. Accumulation of capital is, therefore, increase
 of the proletariat. [1]