Considering the social capital in its totality, the movement of its
 accumulation now causes periodical changes, affecting it more or less as a
 whole, now distributes its various phases simultaneously over the different
 spheres of production. In some spheres a change in the composition of capital
 occurs without increase of its absolute magnitude, as a consequence of simple
 centralisation; in others the absolute growth of capital is connected with
 absolute diminution of its variable constituent, or of the labour power
 absorbed by it; in others again, capital continues growing for a time on its
 given technical basis, and attracts additional labour power
 in proportion to its increase, while at other times it undergoes organic
 change, and lessens its variable constituent; in all spheres, the increase of
 the variable part of capital, and therefore of the number of labourers employed
 by it, is always connected with violent fluctuations and transitory production
 of surplus population, 591whether this takes the more striking form of
 the repulsion of labourers already employed, or the less evident but not less
 real form of the more difficult absorption of the additional labouring
 population through the usual channels. [14] With the magnitude of social capital already
 functioning, and the degree of its increase, with the extension of the scale of
 production, and the mass of the labourers set in motion, with the development
 of the productiveness of their labour, with the greater breadth and fulness of
 all sources of wealth, there is also an extension of the scale on which greater
 attraction of labourers by capital is accompanied by their greater repulsion;
 the rapidity of the change in the organic composition of capital, and in its technical form increases, and an increasing number of
 spheres of production becomes involved in this change, now simultaneously, now
 alternately. The labouring population therefore produces, along with the
 accumulation of capital produced by it, the means by which it itself is made
 relatively superfluous, is turned into a relative surplus population; and it
 does this to an always increasing extent. [15] This is a law of population peculiar to the
 capitalist mode of 592production; and in fact every special historic
 mode of production has its own special laws of population, historically valid
 within its limits and only in so far as man has not interfered with them.