Capital: Volume 1, Chapters 23-24 by Karl Marx

Chapter 23: Simple Reproduction

1. "The economic character of capitalist becomes firmly fixed to a man only if his money constantly functions as capital." - 711
2. "surplus-value acquires the form of a revenue arising out of capital. If this revenue serves the capitalist only as a fund to provide for his consumption, and if it is consumed as periodically as it is gained, then, other things being equal, simple reproduction takes place." - 712
3. "When a person consumes the whole of his property, by taking upon himself debts equal to the value of that property, it is clear that his property represents nothing but the sum total of his debts. And so it is with the capitalist; when he has consumed the equivalent of his original capital, the value of his present capital represents nothing but the total amount of surplus-value appropriated by him without payment. Not a single atom of the value of his old capital continues to exist." - 715
4. "The fact that the worker performs acts of individual consumption in his own interest, and not to please the capitalist, is something entirely irrelevant  to the matter. The consumption of food by a beast of burden does not become any less a necessary aspect of the production process because the beast enjoys what it eats." - 718
5. "The reproduction of the working class implies at the same time the transmission and accumulation of skills from one generation to another." - 719
6. "In reality, the worker belongs to capital before he has sold himself to the capitalist. His economic bondage is at once mediated through and concealed by, the periodic renewal of the act by which he sells himself, his change of masters, and the oscillations in the market-price of his labour." - 723-4

Chapter 24: The Transformation of Surplus-Value into Capital

- Capitalist production on a progressively increasing scale. The inversion which converts the property laws of commodity production into laws of capitalist appropriation

1. "surplus-value can be transformed into capital only because the surplus product, whose value it is, already comprises the material components of a new quantity of capital." - 727
2. "All capital needs to do is to incorporate this additional labour-power, annually supplied by the working class in the shape of labour-powers of all ages, with the additional means of production comprised in the annual product" - 727
3. "the working class creates by the surplus labour of one year the capital destined to employ additional labour in the following year. And this is what is called creating  capital out of capital." - 729
4. "The constant sale and purchase of labour-power is the form;the content is the constant appropriation by the capitalist, without equivalent, of a portion of the labour of others which has already been objectified, and his repeated exchange of this labour for a greater quantity of the living labour of others." - 730

- The political economists' erroneous conception of reproduction on an increasing scale

1. "The classical economists are therefore quite right to maintain that the consumption of surplus product by productive, instead of unproductive, workers is a characteristic feature of the process of accumulation." - 736
2. "The movements of the individual capitals and personal revenues cross and intermingle, and become lost in a general alternation of positions, i.e. in the circulation of society's wealth." - 737

- Division of surplus-value into capital and revenue. The abstinence theory

1. "One part of the surplus-value is consumed by the capitalist as revenue, the other part is employed as capital, i.e. it is accumulated...the ratio of these parts determines the magnitude of accumulation." - 738
2. "the development of capitalist production makes it necessary constantly to increase the amount of capital laid out in a given industrial undertaking, and competition subordinates every individual capitalist to the immanent laws of capitalist production as external and coercive laws. It compels him to keep extending his capital, so as to preserve it, and he can only extend it by means of progressive accumulation." - 739
3. "Accumulation is the conquest of the world of social wealth." - 739
4. "Accumulation for the sake of accumulation, production for the same of production: this was the formula in which classical economics expressed the historical mission of the bourgeoisie in the period of its domination." - 742

- The circumstances which, independently of the proportional division of surplus-value into capital and revenue, determine the extent of accumulation:

1. the degree of exploitation of labour-power
2. the productivity of labour
3. the growing difference in amount between capital employed and capital consumed
4. the magnitude of the capital advanced