If we consider the process of production from the point of view
 of the simple labour process, the labourer stands in relation to the means
 of production, not in their quality as capital, but as the mere means and
 material of his own intelligent productive activity. In tanning, e.g.,
 he deals with the skins as his simple object of labour. It is not the capitalist
 whose skin he tans. But it is different as soon as we deal with the process
 of production from the point of view of the process of creation of surplus-value.
 The means of production are at once changed into means for the absorption
 of the labour of others. It is now no longer the labourer that employs
 the means of production, but the means of 294production that employ
 the labourer. Instead of being consumed by him as material elements of
 his productive activity, they consume him as the ferment necessary to their
 own life-process, and the life-process of capital consists only in its movement
 as value constantly expanding, constantly multiplying itself. Furnaces
 and workshops that stand idle by night, and absorb no living labour, are
 “a mere loss” to the capitalist. Hence, furnaces and workshops constitute
 lawful claims upon the night-labour of the work-people. The simple transformation
 of money into the material factors of the process of production, into means
 of production, transforms the latter into a title and a right to the labour
 and surpluslabour of others. An example will show, in conclusion, how this
 sophistication, peculiar to and characteristic of capitalist production,
 this complete inversion of the relation between dead and living labour,
 between value and the force that creates value, mirrors itself in the consciousness
 of capitalists. During the revolt of the English factory lords between
 1848 and 1850, “the head of one of the oldest and most respectable houses
 in the West of Scotland, Messrs. Carlile Sons & Co., of the linen and
 cotton thread factory at Paisley, a company which has now existed for about
 a century, which was in operation in 1752, and four generations of the
 same family have conducted it” ... this “very intelligent gentleman” then
 wrote a letter[7] in the Glasgow Daily Mail of April 25th, 1849, with the title, “The relay system,” in which among other
 things the following grotesquely naïve passage occurs: “Let us now
 ... see what evils will attend the limiting to 10 hours the working of
 the factory.... They amount to the most serious damage to the millowner’s
 prospects and property. If he (i.e., his “hands”) worked 12 hours before, and
 is limited to 10, then every 12 machines or spindles in his establishment
 shrink to 10, and should the works be disposed of, they will be valued
 only as 10, so that a sixth part would thus be deducted from the value
 of every factory in the country.”[8]