ABSTRACT
We may now turn to Marx’s historical statement: the advance of capitalist production is characterised by accumulation of wealth at one pole and deprivation and misery at the other.1 ‘How much more coherent and useful the voluminous literature of recent years on poverty and related questions would be if it had started from this solid foundation’ proclaims Paul M. Sweezy.2 In keeping with this perspective, some aspects of the accumulation of capital and the immiserisation of labour as a dialectical process are analysed in this chapter. The analysis is presented in two sections. In the fi rst section, the conditions of subsistence and reproduction of labour power in terms of earnings and levels of living are explored. In the second section, the changing mechanisms of exploitation in tandem with the changes in the capitalist world system are examined; the volume of accumulation thus realised and the forms of its repatriation are also examined in this section.
