MARXIAN POLITICAL ECONOMY 49 distinct from that of a single, isolated once-for-all round of production. Year after year, the workers produce not only what later flows back to them as wages, but also surplus value which goes to feed and reproduce the capitalist class at a much higher level of living than that of the workers. This real state of affairs is concealed by the money form of wage payment whereby it appears that after all the capitalist is paying the worker for his labour. Marx puts the matter thus: What flows back to the labourer in the shape of wages is a portion of the product that is continuously reproduced by him. The illusion begotten by the intervention of money vanishes immediately, if, instead of taking a single capitalist and a single labourer, we take the class of labourers as a whole. The capitalist class is constantly giving to the labouring class order-notes, in the form of money, on a portion of the commodities produced by the latter and appropriated by the former. The labourers give these order-notes back just as constantly to the capitalist class, and in this way get their share of' their own product. The transaction is veiled by the commodity-form on the product and the money-form of the commodity.8 By working and producing for the capitalists, the working class produces not merely commodities, it produces commodities as capital, That is to say, the objects produced by the workers (a) are commodities, and (b) constitute the material elements of constant and variable capital in society as a whole. In this way, ^The labourer therefore constantly produces material, objective wealth, but in the form of capital of an alien power that dominates and exploits him.59*' From the viewpoint of the capitalist class, only that part of the workers' consumption which is essential to the reproduction of the working class is ^productive9. For this alone produces the conditions which make it possible to continue the exploitation of the workers and the existence of the capitalists. By the same token, from the worker's viewpoint., his individual consumption is ^unproductive as regards himself, for it reproduces nothing but the needy individual; (and) it is productive to the capitalist and to the state, since it is production of the power that creates their wealth.998 For the worker, his individual consumption plays a dual role: (a) it helps him reproduce himself; (b) since, in the process, he consumes his wages, it forces him to go back to the labour-market continually. To summarize, "Capitalist production... under its aspect of a continuous connected process, of a process of reproduction, produces not only commodities, not only surplus value but it also produces and reproduces the capitalist relation; on the one side the capitalist, on the other the wage-labourer.99e Primary or Primitive Accumulation Earlier on, we had examined the process by which surplus value