Capital has not invented surplus-labour. Wherever
 a part of society possesses the monopoly of the means of production, the
 labourer, free or not free, must add to the working-time necessary for
 his own maintenance an extra working-time in order to produce the means
 of subsistence for the owners of the means of production, [7] whether this proprietor be the Athenian caloς cagaqoς [well-to-do man], Etruscan theocrat, civis Romanus [Roman citizen], Norman baron, American slave-owner, Wallachian Boyard, modern landlord or capitalist. [8] It is, however, clear that in any given economic formation of society, where not the exchange-value
 but the use-value of the product predominates, surplus-labour will be limited
 by a given set of wants which may be greater or less, and that here no
 boundless thirst for surplus-labour arises from the nature of the production
 itself. Hence in antiquity over-work becomes horrible only when the object
 is to obtain exchange-value in its specific independent money-form; in
 the production of gold and silver. Compulsory working to death is here
 the recognised form of over-work. Only read Diodorus Siculus. [9] Still these are exceptions in antiquity. But as soon as people, whose
 production still moves within the lower forms of slave-labour, corvée-labour,
 &c., are drawn into the whirlpool of an international market dominated
 by the capitalistic mode of production, the sale of their products for
 export becoming their principal interest, the civilised horrors of over-work
 are grafted on the barbaric horrors of slavery, serfdom, &c. Hence
 the negro labour in the Southern States of the American Union preserved
 something of a patriarchal character, so long as production was chiefly
 directed to immediate local consumption. But in proportion, as the export
 of cotton became of vital interest to these states, the over-working of
 the negro and sometimes the using up of his life in 7 years of labour became
 a factor in a calculated and calculating system. It was no longer a question
 of obtaining from him a certain quantity of useful products. It was now
 a question of production p227of surplus-labour itself: So was it
 also with the corvée, e.g., in the Danubian Principalities (now
 Roumania).