Variable capital is therefore only a particular historical form
 of appearance of the fund for providing the necessaries of life, or the
 labour-fund which the labourer requires for the maintenance of himself
 and family, and which, whatever be the system of social production, he
 must himself produce and reproduce. If the labour-fund constantly flows
 to him in the form of money that pays for his labour, it is because the
 product he has created moves constantly away from him in the form of capital.
 But all this does not alter the fact, that it is the labourer’s own labour,
 realised in a product, which is advanced to him by the capitalist. [3] Let us take a peasant liable to do compulsory service for his lord. He
 works on his own land, with his own means of production, for, say, 3 days
 a week. The 3 other days he does forced work on the lord’s domain. He constantly
 reproduces his own labour-fund, which never, in his case, takes the form
 of a money payment for his labour, advanced by another person. But in return,
 his unpaid forced labour for the lord, on its side, never acquires the
 character of voluntary paid labour. If one fine morning the lord appropriates
 to himself the land, the cattle, the seed, in a word, the, means of production
 of this peasant, the latter will thenceforth be obliged to sell his labour-power
 to the lord. He will, ceteris paribus, labour 6 days a week as before,
 3 for himself, 3 for his lord, who thenceforth becomes a wages-paying capitalist.
 As before, he will use up the means of production as means of production,
 and transfer their value to the product. As before, a definite portion
 of the product will be devoted to reproduction. But from the moment that
 the forced labour is changed into wage labour, from that moment the labour-fund,
 which the peasant himself continues as before to produce and reproduce,
 takes the form of a capital advanced in the form of wages by the lord.
 The bourgeois economist whose narrow mind is unable to separate the form
 of appearance from the thing that appears, shuts his eyes to the fact,
 that it is but here and there on the face of the 534earth, that
 even nowadays the labour fund crops up in the form of capital. [4]