Читать книгу A Companion to Marx's Capital - David Harvey - Страница 12

I want to cast a backward look at the direction Marx’s argument has taken thus far. I do so with the help of a diagrammatic representation of his dialectical chain of argumentation (see figure above). Reducing Marx’s argument to this format inevitably does an injustice to the richness of his thinking, but I think it useful to have some sort of cognitive map of his argument so that you can more easily navigate its swirling crosscurrents.

He begins with the unitary concept of the commodity, which embodies the duality of use- and exchange-values. What lies behind exchange-value is the unitary concept of value defined as socially necessary labor-time (“socially necessary” implies someone wants or needs the use-value). Value internalizes a duality of concrete and abstract labor, which conjoin in an act of exchange through which value gets expressed in the duality of relative and equivalent forms of value. From this, a money commodity emerges as the representative of the universality of value, but this disguises the inner meaning of value as a social relation to produce the fetishism of commodities, understood as material relations between persons and social relations between things. In the marketplace, people relate to one another not as people but as buyers and sellers of things. Here Marx assumes, as in liberal theory, private property rights, juridical individuals and perfectly functioning markets. Within that world, money, the representation of value, takes on two distinctive and potentially antagonistic roles, as the measure of value and as the means of circulation. But finally there is only one money, and the tension between the two roles is seemingly resolved by a new money relation, that between debtors and creditors. This shifts the focus from a C-M-C form of circulation to M-C-M, which is, of course, the prototype of the concept of capital defined not as a thing but as a form of circulation of value that produces a surplus-value (profit), M-C-M + ΔM. This poses a contradiction between the equivalence supposed in perfect market exchange and the non-equivalence required in the production of surplus-value. This contradiction is resolved by the existence of labor-power as a commodity that can be bought and sold on the market and then used to produce value and therefore surplus-value. And so we arrive, finally, at the grand conception of a class relation between capital and labor.

This is not, please note, a causal chain of argument. It does entail the gradual unfolding, the layering of different levels of complexity, as the argument expands from a simple opposition within the commodity into more and more insights into different aspects of how a capitalist mode of production works. This dialectical expansion continues throughout the book, for example, in the emergence of a class relation and of class struggle and in the dual concepts of absolute and relative surplus-value. And the expansion jumps scale into the macro-dichotomy between the whole of Volume I, which concentrates on the world of production of surplus-value, and Volume II, where the primary focus is on the circulation and realization of surplus-value. The tensions (contradictions) between production and realization underpin the theory of crisis in Volume III. But I go way ahead in the story.

This cognitive map helps us envision how Marx has “grown” his argument organically and by what dialectical leaps. But please remember that the chart is a mere skeletal form around which Marx arranges an analysis of the real flesh and blood of a dynamic, evolving and contradictory capitalist mode of production.

CHAPTER 7: THE LABOUR PROCESS AND THE VALORIZATION PROCESS

We now leave the “noisy” sphere of the market, the sphere of freedom, equality, property and Bentham, and go inside the labor process, where the sign says: “No Admittance Except on Business.” This chapter is, however, unusual in one respect. For the most part, Marx is emphatic that he is dealing only with the conceptual categories formulated within and appropriate to a capitalist mode of production. Value, for example, is not a universal category but something unique to capitalism arising out of the bourgeois era (Aristotle, as we have seen, could not have come up with it, given the conditions of slavery). But in this chapter, for the first ten pages or so, Marx launches into a discussion that is universal, applicable across all possible modes of production. We “have to consider the labour process,” he says, “independently of any specific social formation” (283), thus confirming a position he took earlier, that labor is “a condition of human existence which is independent of all forms of society; it is an eternal natural necessity which mediates the metabolism between man and nature, and therefore human life itself” (133).

We should not interpret these statements, however, in familiar bourgeois terms that presuppose a clear separation between “man and nature,” culture and nature, natural and artificial, mental and physical, and in which history is viewed as a titanic struggle between two independent forces, humanity and nature. There is, in Marx’s view, no such clear separation in the labor process. That process is wholly natural and wholly human at the same time. It is construed dialectically as a moment of “metabolism” in which it is impossible to separate the natural from the human.

But within this unitary conception of the labor process, as happened in the case of the commodity, we immediately identify a duality. There is, says Marx, “a process between man and nature, a process by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature.” Human beings are active agents in relation to the world around them. So man

confronts the materials of nature as a force of nature. He sets in motion the natural forces which belong to his own body, his arms, legs, head and hands, in order to appropriate the materials of nature in a form adapted to his own needs. Through this movement he acts upon external nature and changes it, and in this way he simultaneously changes his own nature. (283)

This is where we most clearly encounter Marx’s dialectical formulation of the relation to nature. We cannot transform what’s going on around us without transforming ourselves. Conversely, we can’t transform ourselves without transforming everything going on around us. The unitary character of this dialectical relation, even though it entails an “externalization” of nature and an “internalization” of the social, can never be displaced. This dialectic, of perpetually transforming oneself by transforming the world and vice versa, is fundamental to understanding the evolution of human societies as well as the evolution of nature itself. But this process is not unique to human beings—ants do it, beavers do it, all kinds of organisms do it. The whole history of life on earth is rife with dialectical interactions of this kind. James Lovelock argues in his Gaia hypothesis, for example, that the atmosphere which supports us right now wasn’t always there but has been created by organisms that once lived off methane and produced oxygen. The dialectic of organic life and the evolution of the natural world has been central all along.

In his earlier works, Marx made much of the idea of a distinctively human “species being” (perhaps drawing on Kant’s anthropology as well as the later anthropological formulations of Feuerbach). This idea takes a backseat in the formulations of Capital, but it does occasionally exercise a shadowy influence, as in this instance. So what makes our labor exclusively human? “A spider,” he writes,

conducts operations which resemble those of the weaver, and a bee would put many a human architect to shame by the construction of its honeycomb cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is that the architect builds the cell in his mind before he constructs it in wax. At the end of every labour process, a result emerges which had already been conceived by the worker at the beginning, hence already existed ideally [i.e., mentally].

This is an important statement. We have an idea, Marx says, and then make it real. There is, therefore, always an “ideal” (mental) moment, a utopian moment, entailed in human productive activity. Furthermore, this moment is not haphazard: “man not only effects a change of form in the materials of nature; he also realizes … his own purpose in those materials.” The activity is purposive. “And this is a purpose he is conscious of, it determines the mode of his activity with the rigidity of a law, and he must subordinate his will to it. This subordination is no mere momentary act.” He needs—we need—to pay close attention, and

the less he is attracted by the nature of the work … and the less, therefore, he enjoys it as the free play of his own physical and mental powers, the closer his attention is forced to be. (284)

There are a number of points to be made about these crucial passages—and they really are crucial. To begin with, there is no question that Marx is here contesting Fourier’s ideas about the labor process. Fourier thought laboring should be about joy, passionate and erotic engagement, if not pure play. Marx is saying it’s never like that. A lot of hard work and self-discipline are required if the imagined is to be made real on the ground, if a conscious purpose is to be realized. Second, Marx here accords a vital role to mental conceptions, to conscious and purposive action, and this contradicts one of those arguments so often attributed to him, namely that material circumstances determine consciousness, that how we think is dictated by the material circumstances in our life. Here he clearly says, no, there is a moment when the ideal (the mental) actually mediates what we do. The architect—and I think it is important to treat the architect here as a metaphor rather than as a profession—has the capacity to think the world and to remake the world in that image. Some analysts argue either that Marx simply forgot his own maxims in this passage or that he is in effect schizophrenic, that there are two Marxisms: one the Marx of this passage, allowing for the free play of ideas and mental activities, and one the deterministic Marx, who indeed holds that our consciousness, as well as what we think and do, is determined by our material circumstances. I think neither view is plausible. It is unlikely that in Capital, of all places, in a central chapter of a work that was revised carefully for publication (and later modified in response to criticism), Marx would take a position that was not deeply consistent with the way in which he understood the world. If these passages were in one of his notebooks, or even in the Grundrisse, that would be one thing. But this is a central transitional moment in Capital’s argument. It deserves, therefore, a serious reading and a careful interpretation.

Marx’s dialectical understanding of the labor process as a metabolic moment immediately implies that ideas cannot possibly come out of nowhere. Ideas are in some sense wholly natural (this is a position fundamentally at odds with Hegelian idealism). So there is nothing strange about saying ideas arise from within the metabolic relation to material nature and always bear the mark of that origin. Our mental conceptions of the world are not divorced from our material experiences, our central engagements with the world, and therefore, they are not independent of those engagements. But there is (and the parallel with the case of money and the commodity is here instructive), an inevitable externalization of an internal relation, and in the same way that the world of money (particularly when it assumes symbolic forms) can both appear to be and “really is” (see the fetishism argument) in opposition to the world of commodities and their use-values, so our mental conceptions move into an external relation to the material world we seek to reshape. There is, therefore, a dialectical movement, when the imagination soars free, when it can and does say I am going to build this rather than that, reshaping material elements using natural forces (including human muscle) in such a way as to produce something new and different (e.g., the potter at the wheel). There is a certain openness to ideas and mental conceptions that is captured here in Marx’s formulation. And in exactly the same way that the monetary system can get out of hand and generate financial crises, so our mental conceptions (our ideological fixations) can get out of hand and generate crises. Indeed, this is exactly the position that Marx takes with respect to the whole bourgeois vision of the world, with its Robinson Crusoe fantasies and its celebration of a fictional possessive individualism and perfectly functioning markets. In the same way that the monetary system is forced at some point to return to its senses in relation to the material world of socially necessary labor, so the bourgeois conception of the world, which is still so very much with us, has to give way to a more appropriate configuration of mental conceptions if we are to address the spiraling social and environmental problems of contemporary capitalism. In this, the struggle over appropriate mental conceptions (usually cast as “merely” superstructural, though note that Marx did specify that this is the realm in which we “become conscious” of issues and “fight them out”) has a significant role to play. Why else would Marx struggle so mightily to write Capital? This moment, when Marx positions mental conceptions, consciousness, purposiveness and commitment, is therefore in no way aberrant in relation to the dynamics of social evolution and the transformation of nature, and human nature, through laboring. It is, instead, fundamental.

Marx is also saying that projects (like building a house) take hard work to complete and that once we have embarked on a project we all too often become imprisoned within its confines. We have to submit to its demands, subject ourselves and our passions to its purposive intensity, if we are to complete it. Every time I write a book, for instance, I start with an idea that sounds brilliant and exciting, but by the time I’m done, it feels like getting out of prison! But there is a far broader meaning here. At the heart of Marx’s critical sensibility lies the idea that human beings can all too easily fall prisoner to their own products and projects, to say nothing of their false mental conceptions of the world. This critical sensibility can be applied just as ruthlessly to communism, socialism and ancient Rome as to capitalism, where Marx will most powerfully and persuasively deploy it.

There is something else about these passages that makes them interesting. Marx, it seems to me, attaches a sense not only of creativity but also of nobility to the labor process. I find the argument deeply Romantic. Marx was undoubtedly influenced by early-nineteenth-century Romanticism. His early writings are infused with Romantic sentiments and meanings. And while this sensibility is subdued in his later writings, it is not hard to detect its presence (even as concepts of alienation move from deeply agonistic in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts to more technical meanings in Capital). But here he says directly that human beings can transform the world in radical ways, according to their imagination and with an idea of a purpose, and be conscious about what they are doing. And in so doing, they have the power to transform themselves. We must therefore think about our purposes, become conscious of how and when we intervene in the world, transforming ourselves. We can and must seize hold of that dialectical possibility creatively. There is, therefore, no neutral transformation of an externalized nature in relationship to us. What we do “out there” is very much about us “in here.” Marx makes us think about exactly what this dialectic means for us, as well as for nature, of which we are but one part: hence the universalistic approach to understanding the labor process. This implies that human nature is not a given but perpetually evolving.

Marx’s positioning here is controversial (as is, perhaps, my own reading of it). There are abundant opportunities to dispute it. You can take Fourier’s position, for example, or some version of the Marxist autonomistic positions of Tony Negri, John Holloway and Harry Cleaver, whose Reading Capital Politically¹ offers an intensive inquiry into the matters now before us. But you have to come to terms here with some understanding of what Marx is saying, see that this is how he is positioning himself, that this is his vision of what the potentiality for creative labor and changing the world is really all about.

So how then can the labor process, as a universal condition of possibility of human existence, be characterized? Marx distinguishes three distinctive elements: “purposeful activity, that is work itself … the object on which that work is performed, and … the instruments of that work” (284). Initially, the object on which work is performed is given in the concept of land, raw nature. But he quickly moves away from this to distinguish raw nature from raw materials, which are aspects of the world that have already been partially transformed, created or extracted by human labor. A similar distinction arises in the case of the instruments of labor. These can be given directly—sticks, stones, etc., that we can use. But then there are the consciously made instruments of labor such as knives and axes. So while the earth may be our “original larder” and “our original tool house,” human beings have long succeeded in transforming both the land and the instruments of labor according to conscious design. “Man,” Marx says, quoting Ben Franklin with some modicum of approval, can be defined “as a tool-making animal.” “The use and construction of instruments of labour, although present in germ among certain species of animals, is characteristic of the specifically human labour process” (285–6). Marx then offers a side observation on which he will elaborate in detail later:

It is not what is made but how [it is made], and by what instruments of labour, that distinguishes different economic epochs. Instruments of labour not only supply a standard of the degree of development which human labour has attained, but they also indicate the social relations within which men work. (286)

The implication is that transformation in our instruments of labor has consequences for our social relations and vice versa; that as our social relations change, so our technology must change, and as our technology changes, so our social relations change. So he here sets up the idea of a dialectic between technologies and social relations which will be significant later on. This is, as we have seen, a typical Marx strategy—to insert a comment of this sort as a precursor to what comes later.

But we are not only concerned with tools in the conventional sense. Physical infrastructural conditions, also produced by human labor, are not directly involved in the immediate labor process but are necessary to its performance. “Instruments of this kind, which have already been mediated through past labour, include workshops, canals, roads, etc.” (287). The labor process depends not only on the extraction of materials from raw nature but also on a built environment of fields, roads and urban infrastructure (sometimes referred to as “second nature”).

So what about the actual labor process itself? Here Marx reverts to a consideration of process-thing relationships. Labor is a process; it’s transforming something into something else. This transformation extinguishes an existing use-value and creates an alternative. Furthermore, “what on the side of the worker appeared in the form of unrest”—that is, motion—“now appears, on the side of the product, in the form of being … as a fixed, immobile characteristic. The worker has spun, and the product is a spinning” (287). This difference between process and thing is always there.

This is something I always appreciate about Marx’s formulation. As an educator, I am constantly confronted with the process-thing relation. The process of a student’s learning gets judged in the end by performative things, like written papers. But it is sometimes hard, if not impossible, to evaluate the process through the things produced. Students may find the process astonishingly enlightening and learn a lot, but if they produce a lousy paper, they get an F. Then they say, “But I learned so much taking this course!” And I say, “How can you possibly write a paper like that and say you’ve learned anything?” But this is a problem that frequently confronts us all. We can totally screw up in producing the thing, but we learn a fantastic amount in the process.

For Marx, the heart of laboring is the process. In exactly the same way that capital is construed as a process of circulation, so labor is construed as a process of making. But it is a process of making use-values, and under capitalism this means making use-value for someone else in commodity form. Does this use-value have to be of immediate use? Not necessarily, because past labor can be stored up for use in the future (even primitive societies usually maintain a surplus product to tide them over). In our world, a massive amount of past labor is stored up in our fields, cities and physical infrastructure, and some of that came from long ago. The daily activity of laboring is one thing, but the way that laboring gets stored up in products and things also plays a critical role. Furthermore, the labor process often produces different things simultaneously. This is what is known as a “joint products” issue. The raising of cattle produces milk, meat and hides, while sheep raised for their meat produce wool whether you like it or not. This will pose problems under capitalism: how, for example, are these multiple joint products to be separately valued? Then there is the problem of how the products of past labor relate to present activities of laboring. This becomes particularly important in the case of the value of machines: “a machine which is not active in the labour process is useless.” The implication is that

living labour must seize on these things, awaken them from the dead, change them from merely possible into real and effective use-values. Bathed in the fire of labour [and this is again Marx coming back to the centrality of labor as process] appropriated as part of its organism, and infused with vital energy for the performance of the functions appropriate to their concept and to their vocation in the process, [the machines] are indeed consumed, but to some purpose, as elements in the formation of new use-values, new products, which are capable of entering into individual consumption as means of subsistence or into a new labour process as means of production. (289–90)

It is, therefore, contact with living labor which resuscitates the value of the dead labor congealed in past products. This points to a vital distinction between productive and individual consumption. Productive consumption is past labor that gets consumed in a current labor process to make an entirely new use-value; individual consumption is what gets consumed by people as they reproduce themselves.

“The labour process,” Marx argues in a concluding passage, “is purposeful activity aimed at the production of use-values. It is an appropriation of what exists in nature for the requirements of man. It is the universal condition for the metabolic interaction … between man and nature” (note again how important this idea of metabolic interaction is in Marx’s analysis), “the everlasting nature-imposed condition of human existence” (which is what he said back on page 133),

or rather it is common to all forms of society in which human beings live. We did not, therefore, have to present the worker in his relationship with other workers; it was enough to present man and his labour on one side, nature and its materials on the other. The taste of porridge does not tell us who grew the oats, and the process we have presented does not reveal the conditions under which it takes place. (290)

What Marx has done in these few pages is to offer universal physical dissections and descriptions of the labor process independent of any social formation, stripped bare of any particular social meaning. I can describe somebody digging a ditch in all its physical detail, including its relation to past labor embodied in the shovel, but I can’t tell from this description whether this is some nutty aristocrat who does it just for exercise, whether it’s a peasant, whether it’s a slave, whether it’s a wage laborer or a convict. So there is a way to look at the labor process as a purely physical process without actually knowing anything whatsoever about the social relations in which it is embedded and without reference to the ideological and mental conceptions that arise within, say, a capitalist mode of production. What remains is to consider how capitalism makes distinctive use of these universal capacities and powers.

The Capitalist Form of the Labor Process

“Let us now return to our would-be capitalist. We left him just after he had purchased, in the open market, all the necessary factors of the labour process; its objective factors”—that is, the means of production—“as well as its personal factor, labour-power.” Two conditions attach, however, to the contract between capital and labor in the buying and selling of labor-power as a commodity. The first is that “the worker works under the control of the capitalist to whom his labour belongs” (291). That is, when I enter into contract with a capitalist, the capitalist has the right to direct my work and assign my tasks. Now, there will likely be contestation over this if that work is dangerous to life and limb, but nevertheless, the general principle is that the laborer will get the money to survive and in return the capitalist can direct the laborer to do this or that. Labor-power is a commodity that belongs to the capitalist for the period of the contract. The second condition is that whatever the laborer produces during the period of the contract belongs to the capitalist, not to the laborer. Even though I am the one who makes the commodity and who embeds concrete labor and value in it, it does not belong to me. This is an interesting violation of the Lockean view that those who create value by mixing their labor with the land are entitled to private property in that value. In general, I think you can see that these two conditions amount to the total alienation (though Marx does not use that word here) of the laborer from the creative potential that attaches both to laboring and to the product. “From the instant he steps into the workshop, the use-value of his labour-power and therefore also its use, which is labour, belongs to the capitalist. By the purchase of the labour-power, the capitalist incorporates labour, as a living agent of fermentation”—again we encounter the Grundrisse’s “form-giving fire” of laboring as an activity—“into the lifeless constituents of the product, which also belong to him” (292).

These two conditions, however, permit the capitalist to so organize production as

to produce a commodity greater in value than the sum of the values of the commodities used to produce it; namely the means of production and the labour-power he purchased with his good money on the open market. His aim is to produce not only a use-value, but a commodity; not only use-value, but value; and not just value, but also surplus-value.

So the capitalist brings together the “labour process and the process of creating value” to create a new kind of unity (293). This is what the capitalist has to do, this is the capitalist’s conscious aim, because the origin of profit lies in surplus-value, and the role of the capitalist is to seek profit.

“Every condition of the problem is satisfied,” says Marx,

while the laws governing the exchange of commodities have not been violated in any way. Equivalent has been exchanged for equivalent. For the capitalist as buyer paid the full value for each commodity, for the cotton, for the spindle and for the labour-power. He then did what is done by every purchaser of commodities: he consumed their use-value.

In so doing, he is enabled to produce commodities with more value than those purchased at the outset, hence the production of surplus-value. “This whole course of events,” Marx concludes, involves “the transformation of money into capital,” in such a way that it “both takes place and does not take place in the sphere of circulation” (301–2). The materials and labor-power are bought in the marketplace at their value but put to work to congeal more value in the commodities produced in the process of production, out of sight of the marketplace. The conditions that are “satisfied” are those set out at the end of chapter 5: that the money owner “must buy his commodities at their value, sell them at their value, and yet at the end of the process withdraw more value from circulation than he threw into it at the beginning” (269). The result appears magical, because not only does capital appear able to lay golden eggs but

by incorporating living labour into … lifeless objectivity, the capitalist simultaneously transforms value, i.e. past labour in its objectified and lifeless form, into capital, value which can perform its own valorization process, an animated monster which begins to ‘work’, ‘as if its body were by love possessed’ [here Marx quotes Faust]. (302)

The form of circulation looks like this:

Let us look more closely at the different steps in this process. The capitalist has to buy means of production (MP): raw materials, machinery, semimanufactured items, all products of past labor (congealed values). The capitalist has to pay for those commodities at their value according to the rules of exchange. If a spindle is needed, then the socially necessary labor-time embodied in spindles fixes value. If somebody uses a gold spindle, then that is not socially necessary. For the labor process to work, the capitalist requires adequate access to means of production in the marketplace. What the purchase of labor-power (LP) enables is the reanimation of these “dead” means of production through the process of laboring (P).

During the labour process, the worker’s labour constantly undergoes a transformation, from the form of unrest … into that of being …, from the form of motion … into that of objectivity … At the end of one hour, the spinning motion is represented in a certain quantity of yarn; in other words, a definite quantity of labour, namely that of one hour, has been objectified in the cotton. We say labour, i.e. the expenditure of his vital force by the spinner, and not spinning labour, because the special work of spinning counts here only in so far as it is the expenditure of labour-power in general, and not the specific labour of the spinner. (296)

In other words, it is abstract labor which is being incorporated into this act of spinning, it is value being added in the form of socially necessary labor-time congealed in the yarn. The result is that

definite quantities of product, quantities which are determined by experience, now represent nothing but definite quantities of labour, definite masses of crystallized labour-time. They are now simply the material shape taken by a given number of hours or days of social labour. (297)

Furthermore, “in the process we are now considering it is of extreme importance that no more time be consumed in the work of transforming the cotton into yarn than is necessary under the given social conditions” (296).

But at the end of the workday, if all goes well, the capitalists find themselves, magically, in possession of surplus-value. The “capitalist stares in astonishment,” writes Marx with heavy irony. Should not the value of the product be “equal to the value of the capital advanced,” a simple adding up of all the values of the inputs (297)? Where does the surplus-value come from, given the law of equivalence in exchanges? “The road to hell,” writes Marx with equal irony, “is paved with good intentions” (298).

So the capitalists look for virtuous reasons to explain the surplus-value. First off, consider abstinence. Capitalists abstain from present consumption and invest the money they save. Do they not deserve some reward for their abstinence? This is a theme that echoes loudly in the long debate over the role of the Protestant ethic in the rise of capitalism. Second, capitalists provide employment to people. If capitalists didn’t invest their money, there would be no employment. Poor workers! Capitalists are doing them a favor by investing their money. Don’t the capitalists deserve some rate of return for that? This is a pretty general and on the surface rather convincing argument—does not investment create jobs? I used to have this argument with my mother all the time. She’d say, “But of course we need capitalists!” I’d say, “Why, why?” And she’d say, “Who would employ workers if we didn’t have capitalists?” She could not imagine that there might be other ways in which you could employ people. “Capitalists are vital,” she would say, “and it is very important we keep them around and treat them nicely, because if they didn’t employ laborers, the world would become a terrible place—look what happened in the 1930s!” The third argument is that capitalists say they work hard. They set up the production process, manage things, put in their own labor-time and take all this risk. Yes, indeed, many capitalists work, and some of them work hard, but when they work they usually pay themselves twice over, i.e., they pay themselves the rate of return on the capital they invest and they pay themselves as managers. They pay themselves as CEOs and then take stock options.

Marx regards all these explanations as subterfuges and conjuring tricks:

The whole litany [the capitalist] has just recited was simply meant to pull the wool over our eyes. He himself does not care twopence for it. He leaves this and all similar subterfuges and conjuring tricks to the professors of political economy, who are paid for it. He himself is a practical man, and although he does not always consider what he says outside his business, within his business he knows what he is doing. (300)

Capitalists may indeed be frugal and abstain, and they may also sometimes exhibit a benevolent attitude toward their workers (desperately trying to maintain their workforce in employment when times are bad, for example). Marx’s point is that capitalists could not possibly sustain the whole system by appeals to virtue, morality or benevolence, that the individual behavior of capitalists, varying from benevolence to vicious greed, is irrelevant to what capitalists must do in order to be capitalists, which is, quite simply, to procure surplus-value. Furthermore, their role is defined, as Marx will later point out, by “coercive laws of competition,” which push all capitalists to behave in similar fashion no matter whether they are good people or proverbial capitalist pigs.

The full answer to the problem of explaining surplus-value follows. You pay the value of labor-power, which is set, recall, by the value of the commodities needed to reproduce the laborer at a given standard of living. The laborer sells the commodity labor-power, gets money, then goes and gets that bundle of commodities needed to live. But it will only take a certain number of hours each day for the laborer to reproduce the equivalent of the value of labor-power. Therefore, “the daily cost of maintaining labour-power” and its daily creation of value are two totally different things. “The former determines the exchange-value of the labour-power, the latter is its use-value.” Labor, recall, is in the C-M-C circuit, while capital is in the M-C-M + ΔM circuit.

The fact that half a day’s labour is necessary to keep the worker alive during 24 hours does not in any way prevent him from working a whole day. Therefore the value of labour-power, and the value which that labour-power valorizes … in the labour-process, are two entirely different magnitudes; and this difference was what the capitalist had in mind when he was purchasing the labour-power … What was really decisive for him was the specific use-value which this commodity possesses of being a source not only of value, but of more value than it has itself. This is the specific service the capitalist expects from labour-power, and in this transaction he acts in accordance with the eternal laws of commodity-exchange. In fact, the seller of labour-power [the laborer], like the seller of any other commodity, realizes … its exchange-value, and alienates … its use-value. (300–1)

There is a key distinction between what labor gets and what labor creates. Surplus-value results from the difference between the value labor congeals in commodities in a working day and the value the laborer gets for surrendering labor-power as a commodity to the capitalist. Laborers, in short, are paid the value of labor-power, and that is that. The capitalist then puts them to work in such a way that not only do they reproduce the value of their own labor-power, they also produce surplus-value. The use-value of labor-power to the capitalist is that it is the one commodity that can produce value and hence surplus-value.

There are, of course, lots of subtleties to be considered. We know from the previous chapter, for example, that the value of labor-power is not a fixed magnitude but varies according to physical needs, the degree of civilization in a country, the state of class struggle and all the rest of it. So the value of labor-power in Sweden is radically different from that in Thailand or China. But Marx, in order to simplify the analysis, here assumes the value of labor-power is a fixed datum. And in a given society at a given time, we can say roughly what the value of labor-power is. This allows Marx to presume that capitalists will pay the full value of that labor-power (even though they may struggle mightily in practice to pay their workers less) and still use it, whatever that full value is, to create surplus-value by milking the gap between what labor gets and the value that labor makes. This gap can be procured because the capitalist has control over (a) what the laborer does in the factory and (b) the product. But hidden within this argument is another variable that Marx has yet to analyze explicitly: how long is the laborer contracted to work during the day? If laborers produce the equivalent value of their labor-power in six hours, then plainly the capitalist can procure surplus-value only by contracting them to work more hours than that. If the workday is ten hours, then the capitalist gains four hours’ worth of surplus-value. This is what permits the extraction of surplus-value in a way that does not in any way violate the rules of exchange.

It is at this point that we need to remind ourselves of the duality of Marx’s project. What he wishes to show here is that even in a perfected liberal society where all the rules of exchange are perfectly obeyed, capitalists have a way of extracting surplus-value from laborers. The liberal utopia turns out to be not so utopian after all, but potentially dystopian for the laborers. Marx is not saying that wage determination actually works this way, but that the theses of classical liberal political economy (and this carries over to our neoliberal times) are seriously warped in favor of capital. The world of freedom, equality, property and Bentham is a mask, a ruse, to permit the extraction of surplus-value from laborers without violating the laws of exchange.

Marx, having set out his fundamental theorem—that surplus-value originates from the difference between what labor gets for its labor-power as a commodity and what the laborer produces in a labor process under the command of capital—immediately states a host of caveats. He observes, for example, that “the time spent in production counts only in so far as it is socially necessary for the production of a use-value,” and this depends on labor-power functioning under “normal conditions.” This raises the question: what is normal? The labor-power should, moreover, be of “normal effectiveness,” again leaving open the question of what normal is, except to say that this will vary from one trade to another and that it means possessing “the average skill, dexterity and speed prevalent in that trade.” The labor must also

be expended with the average amount of exertion and the usual degree of intensity; and the capitalist is as careful to see this is done, as he is to ensure that his workmen are not idle for a single moment. (303)

The casual introduction of the question of “usual intensity” here is significant, for it erupts later as a crucial aspect of labor control because “moments” are “the elements of profit” (352). In all this, the capitalist “insists on his rights” under the law of exchanges, to full use of the commodity that has been purchased and the right to penalize those who do not cooperate fully with his desires. These rights include that labor not be wasted, that

all wasteful consumption of raw material or instruments of labour is strictly forbidden, because what is wasted in this way represents a superfluous expenditure of quantities of objectified labour, labour that does not count in the product or enter into its value. (303)

What we here see outlined is a charter covering the capitalist control over the labor process, and it is through the implementation of these controls that the question of what is socially necessary in the labor process becomes more clearly defined. The outcome is, surprise, a duality!

The production process, considered as the unity of the labour process and the process of creating value, is the process of production of commodities; considered as the unity of the labour process and the process of valorization, it is the capitalist process of production, or the capitalist form of the production of commodities. (304)

Again, Marx distinguishes between the production of commodities in general and the specific capitalist form which uses commodity production to gain surplus-value, thus establishing a different kind of unity.

Finally, he returns to the fraught question of how to account for the impact of skill differentiations within the labor process. Skilled labor is considered as simple labor “with a higher specific gravity as it were.” This is labor of “a more costly kind, labour-power whose production has cost more time and labour than unskilled or simple labour-power, and which therefore has a higher value,” and in turn “becomes objectified, during an equal amount of time, in proportionally higher values” (304–5). In the footnote (305), however, he points out that many of these skill distinctions are illusory or arbitrary and themselves determined socially and historically. There is a long history of this, which Marx briefly alludes to but which could do with some elaboration. I found in my own work on Second Empire Paris, for example, that the definition of “skill” was highly gendered. Any work that women could do was viewed as unskilled, so when women began to enter a trade, the effect was to deskill the labor. This partly accounts for the hostility of some artisanal groups to women’s employment and for Proudhon’s insistence that women did not belong in the workshop but should stay at home. The issue of women’s employment then became a major source of tension within the First International in the 1860s. This does not help, however, with the issue of how to account for labor which is highly trained and therefore costly to produce and maintain. Marx again bypasses this thorny issue by assuming that “in every process of creating value,” the “higher type of labour” can be reduced to “average simple labour” and that we can thereby assume “that the labour of the worker employed by the capitalist is average simple labour” (306). There are in fact some serious difficulties with this argument, which is known as the reduction-from-skilled-to-simple-labor problem. But I, too, will bypass it here, leaving you with a question mark to be examined later.

The lengthy footnote on the relationship between slavery and wage labor (303–4) deserves some comment. When the two labor systems collide and become competitive with each other, the effects are particularly pernicious. Slavery becomes more brutal under the competitive lash of market integrations into capitalism, while, conversely, slavery exerts strong negative pressures on both wages and conditions of work. Any kind of human relationship that might have previously existed between master and slave will likely be destroyed. Of course, slavery varies a great deal in what it is about, but it is not about the production of value in the sense that Marx means it. It entails a different kind of labor process. There is no abstract labor in a pure slave system. This was why Aristotle could not formulate a labor theory of value—because this theory only works in the case of free labor. Remember, value for Marx is not universal but specific to wage labor within a capitalist mode of production.

CHAPTERS 8 & 9: CONSTANT CAPITAL, VARIABLE CAPITAL AND THE RATE OF SURPLUS-VALUE

In the next two chapters, Marx seeks to both clarify and consolidate his theory of surplus-value, a theory that, as Engels notes in his introduction to Volume II of Capital, “struck home like a thunderbolt out of a clear sky.” These chapters are not complicated, so I will go over them fairly lightly.

Marx first establishes a distinction between what he calls constant and variable capital. Constant capital is past labor already congealed in commodities that are used as means of production in a current labor process. The value of the means of production is already given, and so the question is what happens to that value when it is incorporated into the new labor process. Marx argues that the value simply gets transferred into the new commodity. This value varies according to the productivity of those industries producing raw materials, machinery, etc., so to call this capital “constant” is not to regard it as fixed. All Marx wants to signal here is that the value of the means of production flows through the labor process to be congealed in the new commodity. The value remains constant as it flows.

The actual process of transfer of value is complicated by a variety of special circumstances. Cotton goes into a shirt, and in this instance the cotton physically ends up being the substance of the shirt, so it is reasonable to say that the value of the cotton is incorporated into the shirt. But the energy used in producing the shirt doesn’t end up in the shirt. And you certainly wouldn’t like it if bits of a machine ended up in the shirt. A distinction exists, therefore, between the physical transfers and the circulation of values. The two circulation processes are different because cotton is a physical, material use-value but value is immaterial and social (but nevertheless, as was earlier argued, objective). The raw materials also contain a certain amount of past value, as do the machines and other instruments of labor. All these accumulated past values are brought into a new production process in the form of dead labor that living labor reanimates. So the laborer in effect preserves the values already congealed in raw materials, partially manufactured products, machines and the like and does so by using them up (in productive consumption). Marx is going to make a great deal of the fact that the laborer does this favor for the capitalist gratis.

These past use-values and their congealed values don’t and can’t create anything new. They are simply used and preserved. Machines, for example, cannot create value. This is an important point, since it is often held, fetishistically, that machines are a source of value. But in Marx’s accounting schema, they absolutely are not. All that happens is that the value of the machine is transferred into the commodity during the labor process. But with machines there is a problem, because a machine may last for twenty years, and you are producing lots of shirts with it, so the question is how much of the value of the machine ends up in each shirt? The simplest way to account for the flow of value from the machine into the shirt is to say that, for example, one-twentieth of the value of a machine that lasts twenty years will flow each year into the shirts produced in that year. The labor process preserves all these values by passing them through into the commodity to be sold on the market. This can happen, notice, only because value is immaterial but objective, so it is open to being socially accounted for in this way.

Then there is the variable capital, the value given over to hiring the laborers. How does this circulate, and with what consequences? Dead labor is resuscitated and passed on into the value of the new commodity by living labor. This is a very important idea for Marx, and you can see immediately its political significance. Laborers have the power to destroy constant capital (e.g., machines) simply by refusing to work with it. If labor is withdrawn (and “productive consumption” ceases), then the transfer of capital from the machine to the final product stops, and the value of the constant capital is decreased or totally lost. Clearly, the laborer is potentially empowered by this, and to the degree that laborers perform this function they should surely claim some sort of remuneration for so doing. After all, if capitalists can argue for the right to surplus-value on the grounds that they bring employment to laborers, why cannot laborers argue that they deserve surplus-value because without their efforts all the constant capital held by capitalists would be valueless?

The laborers also add value by congealing socially necessary labor-time in products. But the value they create has two components. First, the laborers have to produce enough value to cover the costs of their own hiring. This, when rendered into money-form, permits the reproduction of labor-power at a given standard of living in a given place and time. The laborers spend their money to buy the commodities they want, need or desire in order to live. In this way, variable capital literally circulates through the body of the laborer in the C-M-C circulation process that reproduces the living laborer through individual consumption and social reproduction. The second aspect of variable capital concerns the production of surplus-value, the production of value over and above that which would be required to reproduce the laborers at a given standard of living. This surplus-value produces and reproduces the capitalist. Marx is, in effect, proposing a value-added theory of surplus-value production.

The total value of the commodity is made up of the value of constant and variable capitals plus the surplus-value (c + v + s). If the capitalist is to gain surplus-value, then it is the variable part that needs to be controlled. After all, machines don’t go on strike, and machines don’t behave in cantankerous ways (though they can sometimes appear to be temperamental). The active element in the labor process is variable capital. This is the “form-giving fire” of living labor applied to production. Again, there is a political point to this argument. “Look, dear workers,” Marx is saying, “you are the ones who are really doing all the work here. You are the ones who preserve values from the past. You are the ones who reproduce yourselves by way of your laboring. And you are the ones who produce the surplus-value that capital appropriates so that capitalists can live, all too often in luxury. Obviously, it is very much in the interest of the capitalists to make sure that you don’t recognize your central role and your massive powers. They prefer that you imagine yourself just going out and getting a job with a decent wage so that you can go home and reproduce yourself and your family, preferably fit enough to come back to work the next day. You are in a C-M-C circulation process, and they think you should confine your ambitions to that station in life.” Marx wants to counter this deliberate fetishization by alerting the working class to its true position in relation to surplus-value production and capital accumulation.

So the full circulation process of capital has been defined, and the definitions of constant and variable capital are laid out. “That part of capital,” he writes in summary form,

which is turned into means of production, i.e. the raw material, the auxiliary material and the instruments of labour, does not undergo any quantitative alteration of value in the process of production. For this reason, I call it the constant part of capital, or more briefly, constant capital … On the other hand, that part of capital which is turned into labour-power does undergo an alteration of value in the process of production. It both reproduces the equivalent of its own value and produces an excess, a surplus-value … I therefore call it the variable part of capital, or more briefly, variable capital. (317)

This leads into chapter 9, where Marx uses the categories he has just defined and examines the relationships between them in a more structured way. He here puts his accounting hat back on. Ostensibly, he is looking “for an exact expression” of the degree of exploitation of labor-power. But there are several ratio measures he comes up with that are of interest. Consider, for example, the ratio of constant to variable capital, c/v. This ratio is a measure of the productivity of labor, the value of means of production that a single value unit of labor-power can transform. The higher the ratio, the more productive the labor. Then consider the ratio of surplus-value to variable capital, s/v. This measures the rate of exploitation of labor-power. It is the amount of surplus-value that a single value unit of labor-power can produce. The higher the ratio, the greater the exploitation of labor-power. Finally, there is the rate of profit, which is the ratio of the surplus-value to the total value used (constant plus variable capital) or s/(c + v). The rate of profit is different from the rate of exploitation. The latter captures how much extra labor the laborers give up to the capitalist in return for the value they receive to reproduce themselves at a given standard of living. Of course, you can see straight away that the rate of profit is always lower than the rate of exploitation. If you complain about a high rate of exploitation, then the capitalists may show you their books to prove that their rate of profit is low. So you then are supposed to feel sorry for the capitalist and forget the high rate of exploitation! The more constant capital employed, the lower the rate of profit (with everything else held equal). A low rate of profit can accompany a high rate of exploitation. This is going to be a crucial argument for Volume III of Capital. Capitalists themselves work on the basis of the rate of profit, and they tend to allocate their capital according to wherever the rate of profit is highest. The result is a tendency (driven by competition) toward the equalization of the rate of profit. If I look at a situation and I think I can get a higher rate of profit over there, I take my capital over there. But that doesn’t necessarily lead me to make good decisions from the standpoint of maximizing the rate of exploitation, which is the key element the capitalist should be interested in. In fact, this is where the fetishism of the system captures the capitalist. Even if capitalists recognized all this, there wouldn’t be anything they could do about it. Competition drives them to make decisions on the basis of the rate of profit rather than the rate of exploitation. If they go to a bank to borrow money, then the bank will make its decisions based on the rate of profit, not on the rate of exploitation.

Of course, the ratio of surplus-value not only to that portion of the capital from which it directly arises, and whose change in value it represents, but also to the sum total of the capital advanced, is economically of very great importance. We shall therefore deal exhaustively with this ratio in our third book. (323)

In Volume III, Marx seeks to show that this is one of the mechanisms that drives capitalism into periodic crises of falling rates of profit. I cannot elaborate on this here any more than Marx can, so all I want to emphasize at this point is that you should carefully note the distinction between the rate of profit, s/(c + v), and the rate of exploitation, s/v.

For Marx, and for the workers, it is the rate of exploitation that really matters. Furthermore, an understanding of the dynamics of capitalism requires an analysis of the rate of exploitation rather than the rate of profit. So this is what Marx concentrates on in this chapter. The rate of exploitation can, he says, be looked at in a number of different ways. You can think of it as the relationship between surplus-labor (appropriated by the capitalist) and necessary labor (the labor required to reproduce the value of labor-power), as necessary labor-time in relation to surplus labor-time or, more formally, as the ratio of the value laid out to purchase labor-power versus the total value produced minus that paid for labor-power. The problem, however, is that while all these ratios make sense, there is no way we can observe them in practice. It is not as if a bell rings the moment in the working day when laborers have reproduced the value of v (or spent the time necessary to produce v), so they know that thereafter they are producing surplus-value for (or giving over their time free to) the capitalist. The labor process is a continuous process which ends with a commodity whose value is composed of c + v + s.

While the different elements of value congealed in the commodity are invisible to the naked eye, Marx is going to make the claim, which you may not like, that this mode of analysis actually produces a far better science of political economy precisely because it gets beyond the fetishism of the market. The bourgeoisie had produced good enough science from the standpoint of the market, but they don’t understand how the system works from the standpoint of the labor process, and to the degree that they do, they plainly want to disguise it. They have a vested interest in saying to the workers that labor is just one factor of production that you bring to market, and that is your contribution, for which you will receive a fair remuneration at the going wage rate. They cannot possibly concede that labor is the form-giving, fluid, creative fire in the transformation of nature that lies at the heart of any mode of production, including capitalism. Nor can one imagine the capitalist praising workers for all the value they produce, including, of course, the surplus-value that underpins capitalist profit.

Marx ends this chapter with a fantastic piece critiquing a typical bourgeois representation of the world of laboring. This arose when

one fine morning in the year 1836, Nassau W. Senior … a man famed both for his economic science and his beautiful style, was summoned from Oxford to Manchester, to learn in the latter place the political economy he taught in the former. (333)

The Manchester industrialists were upset at the political agitation to limit the length of the working day to a “civilized” ten hours, after the shallow and not very effective Factory Act of 1833 had shown that the state apparatus was at least in principle prepared to legislate the legal hours of laboring. Senior argued in a detailed pamphlet that what the worker had to do during the first eight hours of the day was to produce the equivalent value of all the means of production used up (constant capital, in Marx’s terms). So Senior had no concept that the worker might be transferring the values already congealed in commodities and took the ludicrous view that the worker had to actively reproduce those values. The next three hours were taken up reproducing the value of the labor-power employed (the variable capital), and only in the final hour was the profit of the capitalist (the surplus-value) produced. Therefore, a twelve-hour day was absolutely essential to gaining a profit. If the length of the working day were reduced from twelve to eleven hours then all the profit would disappear, and industry would cease to function. Marx’s response is scathing: “and the professor calls this an ‘analysis’!” he exclaims (334). “Senior’s last hour” is a vulgar economic argument, solely designed to promote the interests of the manufacturers.

In a funny kind of way, however, Senior confirms Marx’s own theorization. It is the workers’ time that is of crucial value to the capitalists, and that is why they so desperately need that twelfth hour. The struggle to command the worker’s time lies at the origin of profit, which is exactly what Marx’s theory of surplus-value posits. This reaffirms the relevance of Marx’s definition of value as socially necessary labor-time. What, then, is socially necessary about the temporalities of laboring? Not only must capitalists command the labor process, the product and the time of the laborer, but they must also strive to command the social nature of temporality itself. Senior recognizes this fundamental truth, and Marx, using his critical tools and his situatedness on the side of the workers, turns the dross of Senior’s argument into a revelatory moment. The critique of Senior’s last hour therefore acquires a double significance. On the one hand, it allows Marx to depict the depths to which the economists can sink in trying to create apologetic arguments for the capitalist class, while on the other it neatly positions Marx to take on the fundamental truth revealed by Senior’s polemic: that command over time is a central vector of struggle within a capitalist mode of production. The examination of Senior’s last hour therefore makes for a crafty transition to the next chapter, which is all about capitalist time.