If one hour’s labour is embodied in sixpence, a value of six shillings
 will be produced in a working day of 12 hours. Suppose, that with the prevailing
 productiveness of labour, 12 articles are produced in these 12 hours. Let
 the value of the means of production used up in each article be sixpence.
 Under these circumstances, each article costs one shilling: sixpence for
 the value of the means of production, and sixpence for the value newly
 added in working with those means. Now let some one capitalist contrive
 to double the productiveness of labour, and to produce in the working day
 of 12 hours, 24 instead of 12 such articles. The value of the means of
 production remaining the same, the value of each article will fall to ninepence,
 made up of sixpence for the value of the means of production and threepence
 for the value newly added by the labour. Despite the doubled productiveness
 of labour, the day’s labour creates, as before, a new value of six shillings
 and no more, which, however, is now spread over twice as many articles.
 Of this value each article now has embodied in it 1/24th, instead of 1/12th,
 threepence instead of sixpence; or, what amounts to the same thing, only
 half an hour’s instead of a whole hour’s labour-time, is now added to the
 means of production while they are being transformed into each article.
 The individual value of these articles is now below their social value;301
 in other words, they have cost less labour-time than the great bulk of
 the same article produced under the average social conditions. Each article
 costs, on an average, one shilling, and represents 2 hours of social labour;
 but under the altered mode of production it costs only ninepence, or contains
 only 1½ hours’ labour. The real value of a commodity is, however,
 not its individual value, but its social value; that is to say, the real
 value is not measured by the labour-time that the article in each individual
 case costs the producer, but by the labour-time socially required for its
 production. If therefore, the capitalist who applies the new method, sells
 his commodity at its social value of one shilling, he sells it for threepence
 above its individual value, and thus realises an extra surplus-value of
 threepence. On the other hand, the working day of 12 hours is, as regards
 him, now represented by 24 articles instead of 12. Hence, in order to get
 rid of the product of one working day, the demand must be double what it
 was, i.e., the market must become twice as extensive. Other things being
 equal, his commodities can command a more extended market only by a diminution
 of their prices. He will therefore sell them above their individual but
 under their social value, say at tenpence each. By this means he still
 squeezes an extra surplus-value of one penny out of each. This augmentation
 of surplus-value is pocketed by him, whether his commodities belong or
 not to the class of necessary means of subsistence that participate in
 determining the general value of labour-power. Hence, independently of
 this latter circumstance, there is a motive for each individual capitalist
 to cheapen his commodities, by increasing the productiveness of labour.