It has been shown in the course of this inquiry that
 capital is not a fixed magnitude, but is a part of social wealth, elastic
 and constantly fluctuating with the division of fresh surplus-value into
 revenue and additional capital. It has been seen further that, even with
 a given magnitude of functioning capital, the labour-power, the science,
 and the land (by which are to be understood, economically, all conditions
 of labour furnished by Nature independently of man), embodied in it, form
 elastic powers of capital, allowing it, within certain limits, a field
 of action independent of its own magnitude. In this inquiry we have neglected
 all effects of the process of circulation, effects which may produce very
 different degrees of efficiency in the same mass of capital. And as we
 presupposed the limits set by capitalist production, that is to say, presupposed
 the process of social production in a form developed by purely spontaneous
 growth, we neglected any more rational combination, directly and systematically
 practicable with the means of production, and the mass of labour-power
 at present disposable. 
 Classical economy always loved to conceive social capital as a fixed magnitude of a fixed degree of efficiency. But this prejudice was first established as a dogma by the arch-Philistine, Jeremy
 Bentham, that insipid, pedantic, leather-tongued oracle of the ordinary
 bourgeois intelligence of the 57119th century. [49] 
 Bentham is among philosophers what Martin Tupper is among poets. Both could only have been manufactured in England. [50] In the light of his dogma the commonest phenomena of the process of production,
 as, e.g., its sudden expansions and contractions, nay, even accumulation
 itself, become perfectly inconceivable. [51] 
 The dogma was used by Bentham himself, as well as by Malthus, James Mill, MacCulloch,
 etc., for an apologetic purpose, and especially in order to represent one
 part of capital, namely, variable capital, or that part convertible into
 labour-power, as a fixed magnitude. The material of variable capital, i.e.,
 the mass of the means of subsistence it represents for the labourer, or
 the so-called labour fund, was fabled as a separate part of social wealth,
 fixed by natural laws and unchangeable. To set in motion the part of social
 wealth which is to function as constant capital, or, to express it in a
 material form, as means of production, a definite mass of living labour
 is required. This mass is given technologically. But neither is the number
 of labourers required to render fluid this mass of labour-power given (it
 changes with the degree of exploita572tion of the individual labour-power),
 nor is the price of this labour-power given, but only its minimum limit,
 which is moreover very variable. The facts that lie at the bottom of this
 dogma are these: on the one hand, the labourer has no right to interfere
 in the division of social wealth into means of enjoyment for the non-labourer
 and means of production. [52] 
 On the other hand, only in favourable and exceptional cases, has he the power to enlarge the so-called
 labour fund at the expense of the “revenue” of the wealthy.