means of production into "Capital," and gives the laws of capitalism free play. Hence, free trade is the typical policy of capitalism, as is the "free" employment of private property, personal liberty and right to contract, with all that it implies. And protection in any form, or the interference with property and liberty in any manner, is a sign of either an imperfectly developed capitalism, or of capitalism in a stage of decay and tottering to its fall.
What, then, are the tendencies of the development of these elements of the capitalistic system? How do they influence one another in the course of their development? And how is the production and realization of surplus-value, the aim and purpose of capitalistic economic activity, affected by the sum-total of these influences?
The growth of capitalism, in so far as it is not merely expansion over an increased area, but development of force and power, means the rapid accumulation of capital, more particularly of machinery of production and circulation. All our great accumulations of wealth consist of this machinery with the exception of some consisting of land, which, as we have seen, gets its value from the reflex action of this machinery. The accumulation of machinery does not mean, however, the mere piling up of machinery upon machinery; that is to say, it does not mean the mere addition of machinery of the same kind to that which already exists. The process of accumulation starts out, of course, by addition of machinery of the same kind. But it does not proceed very far in that way. The real spring of the process consists in the constant invention of ever newer and costlier machinery. The economic value of this machinery (that is its value as an economic force) consists in its labor-saving quality. It is of the essence of every new invention that it must be labor-saving in some way, otherwise it is useless to capital. This mechanical law of the accumulation of capital finds its economic expression in the law of the rising organic composition of capital.
The essence of all new machinery introduced in the pro-
