of labour-power of a more costly kind, labour-power whose production has cost more time and labour,
and which therefore has a higher value, than unskilled or simple labour-power. This power being higher-
value, its consumption is labour of a higher class, labour that creates in equal times proportionally higher
values than unskilled labour does. Whatever difference in skill there may be between the labour of a
spinner and that of a jeweller, the portion of his labour by which the jeweller merely replaces the value
of his own labour-power, does not in any way differ in quality from the additional portion by which he
creates surplus-value. In the making of jewellery, just as in spinning, the surplus-value results only from
a quantitative excess of labour, from a lengthening-out of one and the same labour-process, in the one
case, of the process of making jewels, in the other of the process of making yarn.18
But on the other hand, in every process of creating value, the reduction of skilled labour to average
social labour, e.g., one day of skilled to six days of unskilled labour, is unavoidable.19
We therefore
save ourselves a superfluous operation, and simplify our analysis, by the assumption, that the labour
of the workman employed by the capitalist is unskilled average labour.
